ntl broadband any good?

beolight

just reading post about ntl broasdband in celbridge

was wondering how people are getting on with it

is the 6mb package any good

do they police the 40gb limit on downloads

anybody know if its available in drogheda yet?

sukhumvit

About the 40GB limit, I download between 30-90 GB per month, let's say the average is around 60, and they never told me anything or restricted my access.

Regarding the perf, I tried the different online tests everybody is always mentionning here and always got poor results, like 2-3 Mbits. However those tests should have something wrong, I download from newsgroups (giganews servers) on a daily basis, and always reach a steady 700-720 KB which is not far from 6 Mb, whatever the day/date/time.

I never tried torrents, that's slow whatever the ISP compared to newsgroups anyway...

So regarding the perf, they are not bad, but their customer service is a pain (expect to have your internet down for a full weekend 1-2 times every 6 months though, to have cancellation letters ignored, to randomly be billed for services you nevers subscribed,...).

cheers

kg703

Ok I am a student in dublin and I need broadband. I download lots of torrents, files etc and I have the ntl 6mb package. My contract runs out in feb and i will never ever use ntl again. We got the tv package with it and we've had three guys out here trying to fix it cause it just always needed to be reset and always would just knock off for no reason. so finally we got a digivox instead(decoder) and rang ntl asking if we could give the box back to which they told us no and even if we dont use it we are on contract so we have to pay for it. Fair enough. But i havent started on the internet. throughout the year our internet has had the funny habit off just knocking off. At first we needed to get our router replaced so they did that. Next just as our exams were on in may the internet decides to go. rang ntl saying our exams started in a week and we needed the internet urgently. they said there was a waiting list and theres nothing they could do for two weeks. lucky one of our neighbours had an unsecured network at the time or i would have been in serious trouble. Next came my next exams in august and of course internet giving us trouble again. Again they say theres a waiting list to fix it so we said fine we dont want your interent anymore were sick of these constant problems. they said even though its their fault we have no net we had to pay around 300 quid to buy out the rest of our contract. Needless to say i was a wee bit pissd off at this point. My boyfriend is also a big game fan and the trouble weve had with xbox live....they wouldnt open our nat saying they were unable to do it. lucky my boyfriend is a master fiddler and somehow got into the router settings and fixed it. anyway to now its jan and we've no net except for the odd hour that we can use it per day. Now our DNS settings are gone. dont know why. the two technicians that have been out here dont know why and of course my exams start in a week lol. i would like to note the technician told us hed be out here between 9 and 1 so my boyfriend had to take the day off work to wait here and the guy turned up at 6! so counting down the days until we can get rid of this and looking for a temp solution til magnet get their asses over this side of the city. Ntl are the mcdonalds of internet providers. seriously. And they are not the nicest ppl to deal with either, lucky for me either am i but im sick of calling and yelling at this point because they are utterly clueless and useless....

ethernet

kg703 wrote: »

Ok I am a student in dublin and I need broadband. I download lots of torrents, files etc and I have the ntl 6mb package. My contract runs out in feb and i will never ever use ntl again. We got the tv package with it and we've had three guys out here trying to fix it cause it just always needed to be reset and always would just knock off for no reason. so finally we got a digivox instead(decoder) and rang ntl asking if we could give the box back to which they told us no and even if we dont use it we are on contract so we have to pay for it. Fair enough. But i havent started on the internet. throughout the year our internet has had the funny habit off just knocking off. At first we needed to get our router replaced so they did that. Next just as our exams were on in may the internet decides to go. rang ntl saying our exams started in a week and we needed the internet urgently. they said there was a waiting list and theres nothing they could do for two weeks. lucky one of our neighbours had an unsecured network at the time or i would have been in serious trouble. Next came my next exams in august and of course internet giving us trouble again. Again they say theres a waiting list to fix it so we said fine we dont want your interent anymore were sick of these constant problems. they said even though its their fault we have no net we had to pay around 300 quid to buy out the rest of our contract. Needless to say i was a wee bit pissd off at this point. My boyfriend is also a big game fan and the trouble weve had with xbox live....they wouldnt open our nat saying they were unable to do it. lucky my boyfriend is a master fiddler and somehow got into the router settings and fixed it. anyway to now its jan and we've no net except for the odd hour that we can use it per day. Now our DNS settings are gone. dont know why. the two technicians that have been out here dont know why and of course my exams start in a week lol. i would like to note the technician told us hed be out here between 9 and 1 so my boyfriend had to take the day off work to wait here and the guy turned up at 6! so counting down the days until we can get rid of this and looking for a temp solution til magnet get their asses over this side of the city. Ntl are the mcdonalds of internet providers. seriously. And they are not the nicest ppl to deal with either, lucky for me either am i but im sick of calling and yelling at this point because they are utterly clueless and useless....

I don't think you want to be publicly proclaiming that you got that replacement decoder :rolleyes: NTL/UPC wouldn't be very happy about that.

kg703

well im hardly going to tell them that am i?

ethernet

kg703 wrote: »

well im hardly going to tell them that am i?

No, but if they see you post and ask boards.ie for your IP address, you'll have visitors.

You've had a nasty experience with them. Make a written complaint. Contact ComReg. Why should you be paying for a service you're not getting?

Kensington

I have 6Mb broadband from them, had it since mid-October. Apart from three major outages and the sometimes extreme throttling of P2P/BT traffic, its been pretty much rock solid for me. Downloads mostly average about 700KBps and uploads average about 55KBps. PS3 online works great on it, very low pings and I also have Blueface VoIP for the landline and a Skype account running over it (sometimes all three being used at the one time) and have had no issues whatsoever with that either. As has been said before though I often find the speedtests might hit only 5Mb download speed most of the time despite downloads steadying out at close to 6Mb.

As for caps, I downloaded close to 100GB in my first month (went a bit mad with the PS3 store and 4od) and nothing has been said of it yet.

But their customer service and digital TV leaves a lot to be desired. E-mails often don't get replied to for about a month after you send it. Literally impossible to get through to anyone other than sales on the phone. Digital box seems to refuse to go beyond "Next" on the browse function and the TV Guide often just sits there displaying "gathering data..." endlessly, that's when it doesn't decide to just suddenly reboot itself or freeze. Channels are compressed to the max. and look noticeably poor on anything above a 20" TV with MPEG artifacts and mosaicing galore.

KG703:
NTL weren't lying when they side they couldn't open your NAT. NAT is absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with them (their cable modems don't have NAT functionality built into it), NAT is to do with the router you have connected between their cablemodem and your PCs/Xbox. NTL do say that they won't support anything beyond their cablemodem if its not one single PC connected to it and so configuring the NAT on your router is entirely your responsibility.

If you still haven't got internet at the moment, might be worth taking a look at http://192.168.100.1 (username=root/password=root if prompted for one) and having a look around for signal information from the modem which'll tell you what the state of the connection is.

jimmycrackcorm

kg703 wrote: »

... they said even though its their fault we have no net we had to pay around 300 quid to buy out the rest of our contract. Needless to say i was a wee bit pissd off at this point. My boyfriend is also a big game fan and the trouble weve had with xbox live....they wouldnt open our nat saying they were unable to do it. lucky my boyfriend is a master fiddler and somehow got into the router settings and fixed it. anyway to now its jan and we've no net except for the odd hour that we can use it per day. Now our DNS settings are gone. dont know why....

Does it make sense to pay €300 to get out of the contract instead of paying normally until it is over but reduce the packages?

Also based on your NAT issue and "fiddler" knowledge, i'd hazard a guess that you have screwed up your router instead of it being NTLs fault.

Did you try connecting directly connecting to the cable modem ( after a power cycle ) instead of the router to see if it works normally?