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

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.