Should I switch to NTL...

Sumanji

Sumanji

Sumanji

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At the moment I'm paying £25 for a Freedom2Surf 2MB uncapped service. Now I'm perfectly happy with the service, but I'm worried I'm overpaying for the speed I'm getting... problem is my line won't handle much over 2MB if I switch to Max (in fact it would probably sync under 2MB!).

So for the same amount of money I could be getting an NTL 4Mb cable line. Should I switch to them? I see it's an uncapped service, but how bad is the traffic shaping? And game pings are usually better on cable right?

[edit] Forgot to add I live right next to the Lenton student area in Nottingham, so will the NTL service here be a bit pants with all the students raping their connections with warez 24/7? :p

Any help/views appreciated :)

Cheers,

Suman
 
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i used to work for f2s, i don't like adsl much as a result, i've had ntl for years and there's not much that can go wrong with it. Pings are great, speeds are good, i don't think they actually have traffic shaping yet do they?
 
Sumanji said:
At the moment I'm paying £25 for a Freedom2Surf 2MB uncapped service. Now I'm perfectly happy with the service, but I'm worried I'm overpaying for the speed I'm getting... problem is my line won't handle much over 2MB if I switch to Max (in fact it would probably sync under 2MB!).

So for the same amount of money I could be getting an NTL 4Mb cable line. Should I switch to them? I see it's an uncapped service, but how bad is the traffic shaping? And game pings are usually better on cable right?

[edit] Forgot to add I live right next to the Lenton student area in Nottingham, so will the NTL service here be a bit pants with all the students raping their connections with warez 24/7? :p

Any help/views appreciated :)

Cheers,

Suman
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I upgraded to MAXDSL with F2S recently and since doing so my line was complete rubbish. With support I'm sure it could have been resolved, but after a month of no response and unanswered tickets I decided enough was enough. I've now migrated over to NTL and can't believe the speed difference. Should get a free upgrade to 4MB in the next few days too. Needless to say that I'm pretty happy.
 
I have NTL at my student house. It is utter utter crap. Its meant to be "10 meg" we are lucky if its 3 meg. It slows down to about 56k speed from 4:40 onwards. You get constant loss and choke in online games. I guess it comes down to the area your in though. My student house is in Southsea btw.
 
Holy conflicting reports Batman!

I don't know what to do :(

/me waits for Tolien to come and give him the short, sharp correct answer :p
 
Tomdun said:
I have NTL at my student house. It is utter utter crap. Its meant to be "10 meg" we are lucky if its 3 meg. It slows down to about 56k speed from 4:40 onwards. You get constant loss and choke in online games. I guess it comes down to the area your in though. My student house is in Southsea btw.
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I live in Southsea also and do experience similar problems. It's only been during the last couple of weeks I've had this problem. Could be something to do with the current upgrades taking place.

On a better note though, I've been with NTL for 5 odd years and never really had a problem with the connection or the customer service..

Go for it!!
 
Sumanji said:
/me waits for Tolien to come and give him the short, sharp correct answer :p
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/me pokes with a sharp stick
Happy?

What you get will vary massively with area (which makes "it's fine for me" more or less worthless as far as QoS goes), and it's overall pretty iffy with upgrades going on. NTL support isn't generally great either.

Personally I wouldn't touch them with a big stick, especially in a student area, and a good chunk of their users evidently agree, but then I'm not after max speed at minimum price (and if I wanted Max, which I don't, I'd get 4-6Mbps) :p

As for Max issues, some combination of a) not jumping onto something big and new with a huge probability of breaking and b) being with an ISP that has a clue, is generally your friend.
 
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tolien said:
/me pokes with a sharp stick
Happy?
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Yessum :D

Are you sticking with an old skool ADSL connection then Tolien? I might just hang on with F2S till the new year or something then, and see how Max and the NTL upgrades pan out. I'm not demanding uber speeds for tuppence, I just feel maybe I can get a better service for the £25 I'm paying atm :)

Any ideas what the upload speeds on NTL 4MB will be? Their FAQ's are severly dated!

Cheers,

Suman
 
Can i ask why, Tolien? If your line is supporting that then it'd support a supremely reliable max service at a rate far exceeding what you are getting. Forget all the issues with it, its issue free as long as you are sensible (which you obviously are!) and get a router where you can control the target snr :)
 
Home2000's been perfectly reliable (and I don't see the issues being ironed out), it would mean either migrating (and Zen's on the whole decent) or being stuck with a 50GB cap, and I'm not desperate to change my 877 :p

But this is mostly off topic.
 
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Sumanji said:
Holy conflicting reports Batman!

I don't know what to do :(

/me waits for Tolien to come and give him the short, sharp correct answer :p
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it depends on your area

as a student in teesside (middlesboro) the NTL connection there was crap. regular outages and throttling.

moved to leicester and everything is hunky dory. Ping is hardly ever over 20, and regularly get 250kb/s out of my 2 meg line (upgrade to 4mb any day now) and not had a single outage
 
Whilst we're on the topic of comparing ADSL and NTL cable, I was just wondering: are cable connections affected by line distance to the same extent as ADSL lines are? The reason I ask is I'm too far from my exchange to get 2Mbps ADSL, but if I jumped ship to NTL could I get 10Mbps (Not in a student area and I doubt I'd have a problem with contention in my neighbourhood)?

Thanks
 
NTL reckoned the majority had <1km of coax between them and the outside world, so no it's not an issue.

according to online guides, i can only get 2mb adsl here.
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Which are mostly inaccurate and/or based on guesswork (or the fact that until recently the most you could get on IPStream was 2Mbps...).
 
no, cable doesnt have any problems like that. the netwrok is optical up to the green boxes you see in the streets then co-ax between the box and your house. It's the equivilant of having an exchange in every street:)

tolien said:
Which are mostly inaccurate and/or based on guesswork (or the fact that until recently the most you could get on IPStream was 2Mbps...).
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no doubt, but there's no easy way for me to find out lol
 
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james.miller said:
no, cable doesnt have any problems like that. the netwrok is optical up to the green boxes you see in the streets then co-ax between the box and your house. It's the equivilant of having an exchange in every street:)
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Wow, excellent! If things don't improve in the near future I'll certainly think about switching then :)
 
I just signed up to 10mbit 2 weeks ago and so far have had nothing but trouble. Ive seen 1 download reach over 1200KB/s which was nice, BUT peak times the speeds degrade bigtime to, well, ive had as low as 50Kb/s. Pretty useless.

What with their massive speed upgrade thingy taken place now, things can only get worse.

Ive got an engineer coming out next week to test the line/box/Pc to see if theres anything rotten. If not then, bugger!

Try and speak to local people in your area and see how their NTL connections fair. Its the only way really, its a bit of a lottery.

But there are really good areas 10mbit 24/7
 
NTL Broadband is totally hopeless. It seems over subscribed at peak hours.

NTL must also have the worse customer service I have ever dealt with. My service was totally unreliable and unusable for six months before they fixed the problem.
 
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