Event - Obnoxious welsh people

[jack]

I've nothing against obnoxious welsh people per se, some of my best friends (if you stretch the definitions of "best", "friend", "obnoxious", "welsh" and "people") are obnoxious welsh people. But if you're attempted to staff a call centre for a cambridge utility company, couldn't you find someone (1) who was willing to answer questions and (2) didn't have an incredibly strong accent? Do all these companies farm out calls to some disgruntled welsh schoolmistress or what?

Anyway, what broadband do I get? The options seem to be:

(1) BT phoneline (£10.50/month) + Wanadoo broadband (£18/month) @ 1M supposedly.
(2) NTL cable broadband (£18/month) + BT Broadband Voice (Voice over IP to exchange landline) (£6.50/month) @ 300k

The second solution is slightly cheaper but (a) the speed is pathetic and (b) the telephone adapter is likely to be a big hassle. And why do I need to pay for a BT phone line anyway? Is there any way of renting the line for broadband without paying for telephone calls?

Comments

[emperor]

Have you considered Zen for your ADSL? They were good for us.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

No, not yet. I'll have a look, I was basically saying $non_ntl_company, and wanadoo just seemed to be the cheapest about when I looked. But BT says there'll probably be a month delay before they can turn the line on so we'll have lots of time to shop around :(

why do I need to pay for a BT phone line anyway

[ewx.livejournal.com]

There's got to be a wire somewhere!

Re: why do I need to pay for a BT phone line anyway

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There's a wire anyway. Can't they recoup the 40-year-old cost of putting it in and maintance as well with a broadband contract as a voice contract?

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

you can't just get BT ADSL without getting the whole package of a BT phone line

BUT you can get NTL cable broadband without a phone line at all.

We use Bulldog ADSL, it's a little more expensive than wanadoo by the looks of it, but recommend anyway.

-- a non-obnoxious half-welsh person ;)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

BTW, I was going to but forgot to mention "but no-one who reads this" about the obnoxious welsh friends; I tried to think of a better adjective ("forthright"?) that could legitimately both describe you nicely but also be a drawback in a call centre, but eventually decided to count my friend as my welsh friend from school :)

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

My friend has had horrendous problems with NTL. She's been waiting 2 weeks for some contact from them about getting broadband, and back when she lived in Belfast the NTL broadband was awful and cuts out all the time. The fact that they couldn't spell her e-mail address, most specifically, the part "@ntlworld.com" did not impress her either...

She's going for a BT phoneline and Tesco broadband now, because their customer care is halfway decent and seem more likely to give her internet access before Christmas (the estimate is 10-14 days).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. The thing is, I've heard horror stories about *all* telecoms companies. It seems impossible to do right :(

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

is this in Cambridge? I've heard nothing but good things about NTL Cambridge, and have used them for a year, plus migrated to a new house with them (admittedly not my new house, but never mind). certainly it is fast and although it's occasionally down, no more so than any other provider I've used.

NTL Cambridge

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It took multiple weeks to get our phone line working again, including engineers not turning up when they were supposed to.

The IP service, however, seems relatively reliable (no worse than the flakier end of business leased line services I've experienced) and it is fast and cheap; they used to have some not very reliable intercepting web proxies (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2002/03/squid.html) but those haven't been active for quite some time now.

Their cable modems, or possibly upstream routers, have a configuration error which shags upload performance, but it's possible to work around that (http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2004/tc.html). Some other ISPs have the same problem.

NNTP service has been shaky in the past and I wouldn't want to try connecting to it from an interactive client, but it's a perfectly adequate source for slurping from.

I've heard bad things about their mail service but it wouldn't even occur to me to try to use an domestic ISP's mail service (or DNS service, though that's a bit harder to fuck up).

Basically we treat them as a connectivity provider and no more and they seem about adequate.

Re: NTL Cambridge

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

Ouch.

The upstream thing is pretty bad but we've had just as bad performance from ADSL. I've not used NNTP or their mail service (other than outbound which IIRC was down for 1 day in the whole year). I certainly like the consistent naming as certainly the hostname and IP keep changing of the BT connection I'm temporarily using, a pain in the arse compared to NTL (just CNAME and forget).

Certainly their cable modems are pretty awful and we got a duff one at first but it was replaced, no questions asked, and they have always turned up on time - the best thing for me was migrating it to a new address with new people and a different service which they handled exceptionally well and sent an engineer round weeks before we had expected.

However people with NThell elsewhere in the country do not seem to have half as much luck (perhaps they expect more out of it?) - my parents have it in Sussex and it's down a lot and slow!

Re: NTL Cambridge

[(Anonymous)]

The upload thing is not an NTL problem - it's inherent in the design of cable modems. The computer connects to the modem at 10Mbps, so sends data to the modem at that speed. However, this means the modem ends up dropping most packets, and the sending slows down to allow for this. Thus stuff takes quite a while to get through, which is most noticeable for things like SSH, and sometimes TCP ACKs, which means the download rate goes way down. So the solution is to use traffic shaping on your end, so data is sent to the modem at below the rate it can send, so the modem does no queueing.

As for NTL itself... we've had very few problems. Our first modem was broken, would only work via USB. However once we figured this out and told them so, it was replaced reasonably quickly. Connectivity in general is fine, and most of the problems have been me screwing up the router config :)

We're using the NTL DNS servers, with a CUDN one as backup, and haven't found any problems. The NNTP server has worked fine whenever I use it... but I still use the cambridge one so I can get ucam.*. Haven't tried the mail server at all...

it's inherent in the design of cable modems

[ewx.livejournal.com]

No, it's not inherent. There's no reason a cable modem couldn't simply have a shorter queue, for instance.

[enismirdal.livejournal.com]

Also, Wanadoo limits how much you can download per month, I think.

[fluffle.livejournal.com]

you want to watch for wanadoo - I'm on French wanadoo at the moment, and my 512 cost me significantly more to get unlimited, so check that the £18 option isn't limited.

As regards welsh in call centres... are they *really* worse than the indians?

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

Wanadoo have a 2gig/month limit on the basic package. The cheapest broadband provider with no limits I found was Tesco at £19.99/month, but that's only 512/256. And having oredered that two weeks and a bit ago, we are still waiting for activation date.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

that's more like it (pricing wise).

we shopped around and got bulldog wires-only. £22.99 (IIRC, it may be less) which is 512/256 peak (8am-6pm) and a reliable 1024/256 offpeak (sometimes 2048 when they cock up!).

[theinquisitor.livejournal.com]

Plus.net are pretty decent, too - although by the looks of it, we ought to be getting a little more bandwidth for our buck. May ask Nick to look into that when he gets back.