Thanks, will phone up next week.
But I can bet anything that when I try next week during the day it will be perfect as people are at work etc and when the kids go back to school the connection is fine, this is my arguement everytime with them but they never say yes we have a problem :/
Yep, this is one reason why I left NTL (VM) a few months back. I was sick and tired of incredibly unstable latency/packetloss in the evenings, I had an engineer round once but of course during the day it wasn't so bad and he reckoned some 'fixes' in the local area that day had sorted it.
So a couple of months later when things were getting so bad I couldn't browse (60% packet loss, latency anywhere from 7-700ms) they arranged to send out another engineer, but he never showed up and they claimed there was no record of it being booked in
That was the final straw so I used their price increase on the 10meg service (£35->£37) as a way of getting out of my 12 month contract.
What annoys me the most about mass-market ISPs like NTL/Sky is that their technical 'support' line staff all cater to the lowest denominator. I'm sure they are very good at telling people how to setup their email, what socket to plug an ethernet cable into etc but if you have a genuine problem then it is so frustrating to have to jump through all the hoops (plugging directly into modem, rebooting modem, rebooting pc, checking local cabling bla bla) that I've already done before calling them. If you have any kind of query that deviates from their script then they start trying to pigeon hole it into one of their boxes. If the person on the other end of the phone doesn't even know what 'packet loss' means in relation to an internet connection then it really doesn't fill me with any confidence that they can understand or fix my problem. They keep banging on about "is your speed slow for downloading?" etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a realist. I know that they need a lot of staff to cope with all the everyday queries they must get from novice internet users and hence they are trained to deal with that. But as someone who works in IT, and has been using the internet since the 90s I just wish I could get through quickly to someone with a modicum of experience and knowledge. At the end of the day, in all those years of using the internet, I have NEVER had to call a technical support line to subsequently find that the problem was something I could have resolved myself. The fact I'm calling a support line means that there is definitely a problem with my line or ISP somewhere or other.
I'm convinced that NTL have, in some regions, congestion somewhere on their network. The problem is that as long as browsing is fine, your line stats look good to the engineer, and speeds (not latency) are mostly OK, then they aren't going to do anything about it.
