NTL National Ethernet

Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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Anyone using this? The NTL website touts it as a cheap alternative to leased lines but there's no costings there...

Ultimately, I'm looking at getting some phat pipage into Swansea and Cardiff customers without paying BT mega bucks, if at all possible.

Suggestions welcome...
 
We're existing frame relay customers of NTL (in Cardiff) and their quote for 100mbit metro-ethernet was in excess of what a BT reseller could offer.

If you go direct to BT, they seem to inflate the price dramatically. I'd shop around a lot if I were you.
 
Have you thought about the BT Infinity package that is being rolled out now, though may not be phat enough for you? Not sure how suited to business it is though.

We used NTL for a few leased lines, initially they were cheaper, but were rather unreliable compared to BT circuits, this is going back about 3-4yrs now though so cannot comment on whether they have got better or not.
 
What quotes are you getting back out of interest?

Virgin Media Business (new venture, pretty much taking over the entirety of NTL business), are quoting us ~£16,000/annum for a 100Mb leased line.
 
They're a bunch of cowboys. Expect ever increasing delivery times as they slowly work out they don't have the network capacity to provide what they've sold you, hopeless account managers and illogical provisioning in the extreme. Some engineers are OK, some are complete idiots. Then you have the issue the CPE is cheap and prone to failure...

But they are very cheap.

It's a trade off, if you want a 10-100Mbit circuit for as little as possible and you're prepared to hassle their project managers three times a week until it gets installed then maybe it's worth it.

There's also the aspect there's not a whole lot of decent providers with real nationwide coverage that I've got anything good to say about. Colt are the stand out decent ones to deal with for remote office circuits, fibrenet used to be good but got bought by global crossing and are now spectacularly bad.

In comparison to most, BT WES services are excellent (but I've only one experience of their internet access product and it isn't good - it's being ripped out despite having a year left on the contract it's so bad in fact.).
 
What quotes are you getting back out of interest?

Virgin Media Business (new venture, pretty much taking over the entirety of NTL business), are quoting us ~£16,000/annum for a 100Mb leased line.

I got my 100mbit for £797/month ex. VAT from a BT reseller (+-8 miles as the crow flies). Hardware excluded.
 
Ah :P Virgin Media should be covering the first £10000 of that bill though.

I've got the same issue with them at the moment. Our 100mbit point-to-point line is over BT but our internet circuits are over VM/NTL for (almost) full diversity. They have to dig up 15m of paving at our one site to install the cable but they cover up to £10k of planned work.
 
If you're considering National Ethernet anywhere near Cardiff then please make sure that your circuits don't go through NTL's Treforest site!

We have a 10mmeg National Ethernet between our Southampton and Tonypandy sites and there have been power failures at Treforest 3 times in the last 3 months!
 
As BRS said, NTL are cowboys. We had a 4 over 100 leased line and wanted to upgrade it to 10 over 100 with some extra IP addresses.

The order was placed in November 2009 for the upgrade, the bandwidth upgrade was applied 2 weeks ago and we're still waiting for the IP addresses.
 
There was a fantastic video on youtube titled 'virgin media planning meeting' which subtitled on top of downfall (a la the 'hitler banned from xbox live' videos) but it's been removed unfortunately. It was brilliant...
 
We have just taken 4 of these out,
One client was paying for a Laser link - £12.5 k PA

One was on a BT 10MB Line - £24k installation - £39k PA.

NOW,

VM - 100MB Leased line - £10k installation (After many major F' Ups it was reduced, from 50k) and then £16k PA.
 
wholesale unfortunately (we'd sooner not deal with bloody eco and the rest but the cost savings are substantial compared to resellers and BT retail, which only goes to show how much they're making off it...
 
I'm seriously impressed by the costings. Do you have any contact information that I could use (we're still tendering for this contract, and if I can escape VM, then I'll give it a go)?
 
We had a quote for a pipe between two of our sites. Surprisingly, going from 10mb -> 100mb was only about 2.5k increase. I think it was around 10k for 10mbit, 12.5 for 100mbit. The sites are ~15miles apart.
 
We had a quote for a pipe between two of our sites. Surprisingly, going from 10mb -> 100mb was only about 2.5k increase. I think it was around 10k for 10mbit, 12.5 for 100mbit. The sites are ~15miles apart.

Yeah, they got forced to do that because of the way it works, it's a point to point fibre logically and the only additional cost for 100mb over 10mb is for the different CPE card. Installing 10Mb circuits is pointless these days, may as well get a 100mb bearer and 10mb commit over it...
 
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