[sclug] ADSL Trouble

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 12:32, Scott Rixon wrote:
> Hi all!!
> 
> I have just bought my first house!!

Congratulations!

> One of the main requirements is fast
> Internet access, it's in Calcot Reading, so ADSL no problem...
> 
> Or so I thought....
> 
> BT have been out.. I'm too far from the exchange!! AAAHHHH.......

I got a lot of confused looks from Estate Agents to the "How far is that
from the BT Exchange in Wanstead?" question, but it was worth digging my
heals in, and pointing out that I wasn't going to buy until they told me
the property's phone number, so I could check it.

> I now have a Business order with NTL.. Anyone used them? 

Yup, they are a bunch of clueless fuckwits. (you can quote me on that).

Oh dear, I think I'm about to ruin your day, but the truth will out.

How did they cock-up, let me count the ways: ...

Well most of it was ISDN, which they know nothing about as far as I can
tell, but I should have known that from an end note from one of the
Dilbert books, where Scott Adams points out that most of the telecos are
a bit clueless about ISDN, so what chance has a cableco got.  You live
and learn.

The two clasics were the way, after I moved to ISDN, that the PSTN lines
poped back onto the bill a few months later, and to add insult to
injury, the charged me for the installation of those imaginary lines.

Now that I no longer live in Reading, I asked them to forward my old
number.  They told me that they would have to deactivate the ISDN in
order to do that, which seemed fair enough to me.  So, I wonder, how did
they come to the conclusion that they should carry on charging for the
ISDN lines that they insisted on deactivating?  Also, I'm slightly
bemused by the fact that the 200 quid they then stole from me via direct
debit is now laguishing on my account showing as a credit, and they
won't give it back unless I cancel my account, so now they are stealing
my interest too.

Oh, and if your anywhere near reading, you are probably going to be
connected to the exchange that once belonged to Telecential (IIRC) which
is a Nortel DMS100[1].  Just about all of NTLs other exchanges, as far
as I could work out, are System X, which means that the people in
reading seem to be mildly confused System X engineers.

[1] Do you know the model number of your teleco's exchange equipment?   
How shit do you think their ability to provide me with what I wanted was
for me to go to the effort of discovering this, so I could tell them
that the exchange was perfectly capable, even if their monkeys didn't
know which buttons to push to make it happen.  Well, if you double your
guess, you'll be getting there.

I could go on with the the tales of incompetence, but that taster
probably serves.

Having said all that, broadband is probably a totally different team
from business ISDN, and is probably a lot simpler for them in many ways,
so you might be all right.

> They do a 512K connection, don't know about up-speed. The home one is
> 128K. It's ?70 a month. For a one off payment of ?10 I can have 4
> static IP's! Lets hope it works!!

Are you sure you can have 4 IPs?  or is that that you can have 4 MAC
addresses, any of which are allowed to use the one static IP, depending
on which machine you switch on at any one time?  Just asking because I
know someone that got stitched on that already (cannot remember if that
was cable modem, or ADSL).

I do know someone that uses the set-top box thing from NTL, and is
pretty happy with it, except that it has gone of the air a few times,
and that they tend to insist that there's a problem in you area, as an
initial default response, so never get to the point of realizing that
you really do have a local problem.  Once you fight past that, I think
he's been pretty happy with it.  I definitely wouldn't bet my business
on it though, even discounting the above bile.

Depending on what your requirement is, if you don't need to worry about
latency, you might want to consider satelite, either as a sole solution,
or as a backup, depending on how serious your need for continuous
connectivity is.

> Fingers crossed..

Good Luck --- keep a watchful eye on your NTL bills.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
Say no to software patents!  http://petition.eurolinux.org/

|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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