Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Gareth Harper wrote: It's cable of course, so it's not something you can migrate towards, but I have to admit Virgin Medias tech support has gotten a LOT better recently. Hmm last time I called NThell they investigated and told me there was a problem with the lines and assigned a call out. Afew days after the appointed day the engineer turned up (he showed me the paperwork that gave him which day he was supposed to visit) and explained what the problem really was (the modem was really, really old and dead) and how support are always talking complete and utter shite to try and get people off the line as quickly as possible. He was also very pissed of when I showed him the email confirming my appointment some three days before. He had had a lot of jobs where no one was in and was not a happy bunny. About two or three years ago Virgin moved to a premium support service. Shortly after this our NThell line started getting cut off about once per month. Spoke to a number of people I know on the estate (different streets/cabs) and they all had the same experience. Outages were always aroudn one hour long. From talking to someone techy who works for them, it appears that these outages were planned. I can only assume they were trying to get people to phone the 1UKP/min support line as they desperately needed the dosh about then. From recent experience NThell support is just as bad as it always has been. They only way to get support is to call the contracts desk and ask to have the line turned off. They ask why and you explain it no longer works. They ask if you have called support and I say No, I just want is turned off as it is always failing. They have an engineer out that day... Jacqui
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 12:07:53PM +0100, Roger Burton West wrote: On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 11:30:10AM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: The only thing that WebTapestry lacks that Zen has is a Usenet service. This has done wonders for my productivity :) Leaving Demon meant I lost their USENET feed. Now I'm running my own node. Such is the way of the world... I've been using news.individual.net for years, and consider it good enough to be worth paying for. -- David Cantrell | top google result for internet beard fetish club Vegetarian: n: a person who, due to malnutrition caused by poor lifestyle choices, is eight times more likely to catch TB than a normal person
Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Cheers, Dave...
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Cheers, Dave... I was with Demon (good, then not so good), Zen (excellent, but a bit pricey) and now Be* (good and super fast). HTH Pete --
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
lists wrote: Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Cheers, Dave... I was with Demon (good, then not so good), Zen (excellent, but a bit pricey) and now Be* (good and super fast). I'm still with Zen, because even though they're pricey they have been excellent on the small number of occasions that things went wrong. I've heard tales the Be are not always great when things are not working as they should, but that they are rather good when things are working (which seems to be most of the time). --billy -- http://billyabbott.co.uk
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
2009/10/1 Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk: Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? +1 for Nildram. Excellent tech support last time a line card failed in my local exchange. paul
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 07:19:00AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. I came to that conclusion in 02. Maybe they are even less like their former self now. I am happy with Andrews and Arnold. very helpful staff,
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Another vote for Zen, especially the business class packages, but the standard ones have been good as well. We have about six ADSL connections with them, connecting this or that office to our VPN. Their tech support is very responsive. -d. Damon Allen Davison On 1 Oct 2009, at 07:19, Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Cheers, Dave...
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? I've just spent a very happy year with Be, which only ended because I upped and moved to somewhere already with a connection. I only had one issue, which was the microfilter dying, so I've no first-hand experience of their tech support, but I've heard quite lovely tales of a tech support IRC channel with genuine techies in it. Whenever I cared to measure the speed, it was pretty close to that advertises (16Mb), and I never had cause to doubt it. I spent the previous year with Virgin Media, which was basically electronic masochism. My dad's also had a long (~15 year) reliable relationship with BT, though this doesn't appear to be the norm. -- Avi Greenbury http://aviswebsite.co.uk ;) http://aviswebsite.co.uk/asking-questions
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
2009/10/1 Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk: But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? I was with Force 9 (retail arm of PlusNet) for a while. Their current website claims 8 out of 10 PlusNet customers would recommend us to their friends. I'm obviously one of the 20% that would say avoid them at all costs. Little things, like when I was out of work, and sending out applications all the time, they accidentally reformatted the live email server's disk while in the process of commissioning a new one. Something about typing the command into the wrong window. At one stage our 2Mb ADSL dropped down to 164k before cutting out all together, and going back to dialup was no fun. -- Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt. -- Abraham Lincoln
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On 1/10/09 07:19, Dave Cross wrote: But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? I'm very happy with Zen at home. At work we're augmenting our leased line from Clara.net (very reliable but 2Mbit just ain't enough) with an ADSL line from Be. I'd be happy to use Zen at work but that wouldn't be smart from a business continuity perspective :) Dealing with their call centre to place a business order wasn't a great experience but hopefully the actual service will be. S.
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Be has been good to me. In central-ish London I get 18Mb/2Mb (both frequently realised in practice so contention is presumably good). Service is highly reliable apart from DNS occasionally dropping out for a few seconds, but running a local BIND and adding it to the resolvers list works well for me. They do do more traffic molestation than I'd really like though: traceroutes pass through a mysterious 10.* private network and like all the mass market ISPs they use the IWF's CleanFeed nonsense. On the upside, they leave your packets alone sufficiently that IPSEC works well, unlike one or two others (I discovered this at a security-obsessed former orkplace). The gold standard is Andrews and Arnold, who I used for years, but they're prohibitively pricey for daytime bandwidth use and don't (when last I looked) do ADSL2+. S
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? The 4-hour outage last night sucked, but I suspect it probably would have sucked worse if I didn't have their status line saved on my phone. In fairness to them, they did give regular updates on the status - even though that summarised as it's broken, we don't know why followed by it's still broken, we've asked someone else to fix it. -- Greg
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
I would love to recommend the Phone Co-op for their no-nonsense, no contract, get-your-own-equipment service. However, their customer service often takes weeks to reply (by email at least) and I think they may be messing with my packets (just started to use bit torrent and now connections over ports 1024 are very intermittent). I have asked them what's going on, but won't hold my breath for the reply. And what's with all these newspaper ads: phone, broadband telly for 5p per month (for the first three months)? Do they think people are stupid? Oh, hang on... On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Greg Sheard g.m.she...@qmul.ac.uk wrote: Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? The 4-hour outage last night sucked, but I suspect it probably would have sucked worse if I didn't have their status line saved on my phone. In fairness to them, they did give regular updates on the status - even though that summarised as it's broken, we don't know why followed by it's still broken, we've asked someone else to fix it. -- Greg -- http://evolectronica.com - survival of the funkiest
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 10:54:55AM +0100, Bob MacCallum wrote: (albeit a canned one: we don't block ports because that would be bad for business - traffic shaping is another thing, I assume.) As far as I know, no ISP admits to traffic-shaping. (Demon was working for me, but when I moved house last year they couldn't cope with the idea of I'd like to keep the same IP addresses at the new location - even though it was a business account - so they'd effectively removed any incentive for staying with them.) R
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On 1 Oct 2009, at 07:19, Dave Cross wrote: [...] But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? WebTapestry pretty much just works. The 24Mb/s unbundled service is no more expensive than the 8Mb/s ADSL MAX offering, and they're both cheaper than Zen for the same package. When I switched to WebTapestry, I did notice that international traffic seemed a bit slower than Zen, but this does not appear to be the case any more. The deal-maker for me: WebTapestry's support is *much* better than Zen, because when you bring along a tricky problem, somebody with Clue deals with it without having to deal with a front-line monkey first. Trying to get Zen to deal with a dodgy line I had once was like pulling teeth, and was the reason I left them. The only thing that WebTapestry lacks that Zen has is a Usenet service. This has done wonders for my productivity :)
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On 1 Oct 2009, at 11:00, Roger Burton West wrote: [...] As far as I know, no ISP admits to traffic-shaping. WebTapestry does, but only applies it to particularly heavy users: http://webtapestry.net/terms.html#fairusage Despite my best efforts, I've not managed to have the throttle applied to my line. I'd try harder, but don't have anything humungous I need to download any more. (The last one was the entire Aminet archive, which seems to be 36GB these days. Ironically, the Amiga can't access that much disk.)
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 11:30:10AM +0100, Peter Corlett wrote: WebTapestry pretty much just works. The 24Mb/s unbundled service is no more expensive than the 8Mb/s ADSL MAX offering, and they're both cheaper than Zen for the same package. When I switched to WebTapestry, I did notice that international traffic seemed a bit slower than Zen, but this does not appear to be the case any more. The deal-maker for me: WebTapestry's support is *much* better than Zen, because when you bring along a tricky problem, somebody with Clue deals with it without having to deal with a front-line monkey first. Yes, the couple of times I've needed to deal with their support, they've been great. Things I expected would have to wait until office hours on Monday got fixed by someone over the weekend. (I suspect that they don't guarantee this) Plus when a problem turned out to be BT's fault, they kept at BT until the problem was resolved. Also, their support system uses RT, and so I can *reply to its e-mails*. I @tirade_of_expletives hate systems that merrily send me an e-mail about a new comment added to a ticket, but require me to log into a (n inevitably yucky) web interface to reply to it. Yes, Trac, I'm looking at you. Although I'm also looking at whatever PlusNet used, that replaced the nice system of the ISP they bought. (Worse still if the ticketing e-mails don't give me a direct link.) Nicholas Clark
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On 1 Oct 2009, at 09:18, Avi Greenbury wrote: I've just spent a very happy year with Be, which only ended because I upped and moved to somewhere already with a connection. I only had one issue, which was the microfilter dying, so I've no first-hand experience of their tech support, but I've heard quite lovely tales of a tech support IRC channel with genuine techies in it. Whenever I cared to measure the speed, it was pretty close to that advertises (16Mb), and I never had cause to doubt it. I've mixed feeling about Be (current supplier). On the one hand, you have to sit through the basic crap when you call up the helpline (are you sure it's plugged in? etc.), but if they can't solve your problem, they might put you through to someone with actual clue. As my flatmate told them he's a network engineer, they eventually let him tune the parameters of the connection and delegated reverse dns etc. Also, they don't seem to have shaped the connection, despite the fact we must go well over any fair use policy. I could be wrong, but it seems good enough. Of course being miles from the exchange, we can only get 8mb anyway. We've not had an outage either, which is quite impressive. I spent the previous year with Virgin Media, which was basically electronic masochism. Don't. Just really don't. My dad's also had a long (~15 year) reliable relationship with BT, though this doesn't appear to be the norm. It's not. I'd say Be have provided a perfectly acceptable service, but I'd still recommend WebTapestry. There's something nice about being able to pick up the phone and talk to someone who understands what RADIUS is fucked means and knows how to fix it. --James
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Sorry for the misleading info... Just been looking at Phone Coop site - they don't offer service without a contract any more. minimum is 18 months. So I will be requesting a no contract upgrade from them or I will try WebTapestry. On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Anthony Fisher li...@2799.org wrote: Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk wrote: But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? I'm surprised they haven't already been mentioned, but I recommend Bytemark. I used to have their ADSL (before I travelled) and will likely get it again soon when I have a place of my own. I've also had a Linux (UML) virtual machine with them for a few years. They might not be the cheapest, but in the past being able to phone and talk to a clueful Linux-friendly person as opposed to a support person following a script has been valuable. If you sign up and mention my name (username afisher) I think I get a referral discount from them. Anthony -- To contact me directly please apply s/lists/aef/ to my address. -- http://evolectronica.com - survival of the funkiest
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Paul Sharpe wrote: 2009/10/1 Dave Cross d...@dave.org.uk: Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? +1 for Nildram. Excellent tech support last time a line card failed in my local exchange. paul I'm still with Nildram - and their tech support has been good. I expect I'm paying over the odds though, and my poor copper wires can only do 1.5Mb, though I'm assured this is a physical problem moving ISP won't fix. :-( /R
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 08:45 +0100, Andrew Black wrote: On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 07:19:00AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. I came to that conclusion in 02. Maybe they are even less like their former self now. I am happy with Andrews and Arnold. very helpful staff, I found AA were lovely, but didn't have much in the way of official non-office-hours support. My line failed on Friday while I was at work (which they duly notified me of by SMS), and by the time I could get home and do trouble-shooting that evening, the first time they could respond to my report was Monday midday. They seemed good in all other respects though. I'm currently with Be*, who provide me with an impressively consistent 9-10Mb connection speed regardless of time of day. I'm trying not to feel too cheated that they couldn't hold up their pre-sale estimate of 20Mb - apparently I'm further from the exchange (as the cable flies) than BT told Be* I was. I have in the past had Virgin Media's '20Mb' cable service at this address - it never managed 2Mb in the evenings, and often dropped below 1Mb. Apparently their contention ratios are rather high. Avoid. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 5:11 PM, Denny 2...@denny.me wrote: I have in the past had Virgin Media's '20Mb' cable service at this address - it never managed 2Mb in the evenings, and often dropped below 1Mb. Apparently their contention ratios are rather high. Avoid. If the technology has the same drawbacks as ten years ago when I worked for a cable ISP, there is no good way for controlling contention on cable connections. They can cap bandwidth at the ROC, but the pipeline up until that point is subject to the law of the jungle. Nice in the countryside, not so nice in a city. -d. -- Damon Allen Davison http://allolex.net http://musicindustryrules.com http://thegannet.net
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 07:19:00AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote: But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? I've been on Nildram for ten years, and it Just Works. How much of that is because my account is lost in a dark mysterious void that no-one has touched after Adrian sold the business to Tiscali I don't know, and have no particular desire to find out by notifying them of my continued existence. -- David Cantrell | London Perl Mongers Deputy Chief Heretic Feature: an incorrectly implemented bug
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Oh, I should also mention that the one time when stuff broke recently, the Nildram call centre understood things like traceroute and your border with $fooISP and didn't just ask me to reinstall Windows. The breakage was, of course, my fault. -- David Cantrell | Cake Smuggler Extraordinaire Graecum est; non legitur
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
2009/10/1 David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk: Oh, I should also mention that the one time when stuff broke recently, the Nildram call centre understood things like traceroute and your border with $fooISP and didn't just ask me to reinstall Windows. I had a similar, recent positive experience in terms of technical knowledge. They also said they would call me back. And did. More than once. On a weekend. Which was nice. Between us we managed to do enough tests in order to escalate the fault to the relevant part of BT who did their own tests over the weekend and an engineer appeared first thing on Monday, established there was no fault at my house, went to the exchange, fixed the error on the line card and service was restored. Before that fault I can't even remember the last time I had a break in service. I've also been with Nildram on and off for about 10 years. We also use Webtapestry who are very good. paul
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
Denny wrote: I have in the past had Virgin Media's '20Mb' cable service at this address - it never managed 2Mb in the evenings, and often dropped below 1Mb. Apparently their contention ratios are rather high. Avoid. It must depend upon location and how many heavy users are nearby, as I have their 20Mbps service, and consistently get good download speeds, even during the evening. For instance, using www.speedtest.net right now (7pm), I got 16.86Mbps down and 2.45Mbps up. That's slightly lower than previous tests (I normally see 18-19 at least), but then I have to bear in mind that all traffic is going over a VPN connection to my server in London and coming out there, in order to have a static IP, and a connection that Virgin/Phorm etc cannot snoop upon, and to avoid their transparent caches (I believe they still use them). I've only had to contact their tech support once in a couple of years - the support agent I spoke to seemed clueful enough, understood that I knew the problem was theirs and not mine (modem kept losing sync), and agreed to send an engineer out the next day to sort it. The problem magically went away the next day (without an engineer visiting my house), so I don't know if it was fixed remotely or an engineer did something at a local cabinet, all I know is it was sorted out. Cheers Dave P
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
2009/10/1 David Cantrell da...@cantrell.org.uk: Oh, I should also mention that the one time when stuff broke recently, the Nildram call centre understood things like traceroute and your border with $fooISP and didn't just ask me to reinstall Windows. The breakage was, of course, my fault. It's cable of course, so it's not something you can migrate towards, but I have to admit Virgin Medias tech support has gotten a LOT better recently. I had a recurring packet loss issue over a couple of years (It happened, took a month or so to find the real issue to fix, then they seemed to fix it with a new modem. It came back a year or so later and a new modem wouldn't fix it this time, they finally seemed to track it down and despite telling me they'd need to provision new hardware in the area which could take a month it was fixed inside 3 days). The first time it happened I had to just ring and hang up if I got the indian call centre, once I got through to the scottish centre I'd get someone who didn't take me through a script. The recent time it happened I'd ring up and no matter which call centre I spoke to they'd listen to me, log into my modem, agree with me and push forward either a technician or a second level support callback. This may have been of course as I'd only rung them on the occasions when I do have issues and they'd put a flag on my account. (The final issue turned out to be extremely high usage in my area, they needed to put a new card or something in my local box, which apparently they did quite quickly, it's been fine since. The issue was somewhat clouded by the fact that they had cranked the line power right up high in the area and I was right next to the box, which a lot of the cable techs who came out thought would be causing the issue).
Re: Last Straw. Camel's Back. Etc.
On 01/10/2009 07:19, Dave Cross wrote: Having spent 45 minutes failing to get through to Demon's tech support people last night I've finally come to the realisation that they aren't still the company that I signed up with fifteen years ago and that I should probably be looking elsewhere for my internet connection. I'll be calling them later this morning to get a MAC. But I need somewhere else to go. I'm thinking probably Be, but I'm open to suggestions of other suppliers. Does anyone want to share horror stories or recommendations? Zen. Flawless for the past 4 years. The employ humans, ones who know about the Internet.
