NTL Broadband www.home.ntl.com Review

Good Points
Reliable service. Internet probably goes down once to twice a year, and never for more than an hour. In 5+ years of service, the downtime is easily less than 5 hours.

Fast customer service response. My modem died after 5 years, and within 20 minutes of calling the contact centre (Friday), an appointment was arranged for Tuesday for an engineer and replacement modem to be installed, and they honored that appointment.

Regular free upgrades.

Provide Cable, and not ADSL.

Bad Points
Call centres in India. Although the call centre staff were efficient, I personally prefer UK based call centres.

Upload still at 25kb/sec max.

Not everyone can have Cable.

General Comments
When NTL first launched, they were a complete shambles, with many of their failures in the media and Internet. Ignoring the first year or two of their life, they have now become a solid ISP provider who I often recommend to friends.



I subscribed to the then 512k cable connection within 6 months of it being initially released, and it cost me £25/month. The modem I received all that time ago finally died last month. NTL replaced the modem with their latest model within 2 business days. Since originally subscribing, I have been upgraded from 512k to 2Mb, and then to 4Mb, and I believe it is going even higher soon.



The connection is flawless. Downtime is so minor that this is the only mention it is getting. On good quality servers (ie. Microsoft) I always hit 300kb/sec+. Recently I have been getting higher speeds, but that isn't all the time yet.



The D.N.S. servers, apart from one blip a few months ago, have always been solid since I joined. I don't use NTL POP3 email, so I cannot comment on that.



My only real gripe is upload is still mulling around the 25kb/sec figure, which is only 10kb/sec higher than when I joined.



No issues with payments. Direct debits have been fully automated since day one. Apart from when my modem failed, I have had no other dealings ever with NTL customer service, so I cannot comment further. Although that is a complement in itself.



I guess at the end of the day I rate NTL very highly because they do what I pay them to do without causing me any hassle, which is a lot more than other ISP's from what I've heard and read over the years.