Top tip for getting a discount on Telewest, I was paying for the TV service, phone and 8MB broadband, so was chucking 50 to 60 quid per month their way.

I rang up and switched to their free TV service, which is not highly publicised, but gives you all freeview channels plus sky one for free, and then threatened to leave their broadband as it was so ridiculously overpriced.

They immediately offered me a 4 meg connection for a year at 8.99 They also waived my Talk International charge for a year, so the bill is now 20something not 50something a month.

As I don't do loads of downloads the 8meg to 4meg drop is not a problem for me, specially as it saved me 30 quid.

HTH

 

This is interesting

Broadband
We continue to experience strongest growth in the number of broadband subscribers. Gross additions
were 265,000, an increase of 13% over the previous quarter, driven by our reinvigorated marketing and
compelling offers.
Net additions were 78,100 in the quarter, down from 104,900 in the second quarter. This reduction was
driven by an increase in churn, with disconnects growing by 58,000. Of this, 47,000 disconnects were in
old NTL areas. The number of disconnections was impacted by the customer churn issues discussed
above. Churn was also impacted by a high number of disconnections from customers who had joined old-
NTL in the third quarter of 2005 on a £9.99 stand-alone broadband offer, who have now come to the end
of their promotional period.
Broadband penetration stands at 25.2% of our marketable homes, leaving significant room for further
growth.
As an end-to-end network owner, we have competitive strengths in the quality of broadband service that
we offer. Customers can receive consistent speeds no matter where they live on our network and our top
speed of 10Mb is available throughout our broadband addressable areas. In November, we will be
launching a commercial trial of a 50Mb broadband service to paying customers.

Imagine a 50MB download speed, surely the upload would be 2MB minimum.

Info sourced from here

 

Most jo public people don't want that speed though, although admittedly probably more on here.

Broadband is becoming more price critical, hence the high churn.

Certainly I wasn't prepared to continue paying £25 when there are numerous £10 and cheaper deals out there, but didn't want to go through the hassle of moving if TW were prepared to be reasonable, which they were

 

I think you'll find the 50-100MB connections are geared towards tv-on-demand which will be here very soon

 

Pimmo.....instead of answering questions on here, can you please get out there and lay some more cable.

I'd love to have telewest - but most places that I'm looking at to buy a house only have ADSL.

So start cabling up South Yorkshire

 

I really miss Blueyonder. It may bit a bit more expensive but NOTHING compares to it in the ADSL world. The contention is bad and so are the download caps

Hopefully they'll be cable at my next abode.

 

Do you have a spare room?

I agree - ADSL just doesn't compare.

 

Pimmo any decent jobs going in the knowsley area

Im serious btw

 

No idea mate not my office

Tel you why the queues are so big though, all you idiots call at the same ****ing time.

try before 4 or after 9

 

im looking forward to when telewest do an unlimited service of more than 10mb, 20mb will be better but 50mb will rock it will only take about 12 minutes to download 5gig at those speeds

 

Sure, but you are in the minority there. Most of the general public are more interested in the cheapest deal for a given speed, though that minimum given speed goes up over a period of time

 

You see the problem isn't being able to give these speeds, its being able to give everyone these speeds at the same time !

Unlike ADSL Cable sends Full speed and everything to every set top box and modem, its the modem or the card in the box that tells the connection which speed or channels to give it.

Thats why there is no log on with Cable, it uses the MAC address on the modem or smart card!

Thus take you modem to a friends house and they will get the connection speed you pay for ! regardless of the service they pay for.

 

there is plenty of 20mb cheap services out now but telewests is an unlimited service 10mb is far too slow for my liking but i cant switch to a limited server

 

so would the cable company know if the modem was uncapped???

 

We would notice the network drain, but if it was say 50mb I dont think it would be picked up for a while and the company couldnt really blame the customer only replace the modem.

Its a file inside the modem. You would have to buy the equipment to access it and then run the risk of it being put back... wouldnt be worth it unless you where gonna sell connection speeds to people on cable.

 

Hey Pimmo, I have a question.

I have a modem and a router that has a NAS box attached. The nas box has an ftp server - I want to connect to this when Im on other people's net connection.

Is there anything in the cable modem to stop me connecting to the ftp server over the internet?

ie At GF's house, connect via ADSL and 'dial into' my ftp server behind the cablemodem/router

 

No the modem wont block you, the router will unless you configure it correctly, also not having a static IP might cause you some connection issues? I'm not sure how it is you plan to connect? are you setting it up as a server and if so will it be linked to a domain ?

I cant work out without a static IP how you could do it

 

Dynamic DNS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



re-direct FTP port to NAS, give NAS fixed IP address, provided router supports that service mind you

 

Cool, learn something new, cheers

 

Yep, that's what I've done. Also using Dynamic DNS - although our Ip address hasn't changed yet.

 

Any news yet pimmo??
Sky will be getting a phone call if something doesn't change

 

nothing mate, I'm actually at work now, and no one knows anything about it. Other than we are testing 100mb connection

 

Hmmmmm... I have a meeting on Friday with NTL/Telewests "Head of Products and Services" and will have to ask him when I'll be able to bump my 10Mb connection up to 100Mb... or even 20 or 50!

 

Pimmo, quick question for a friend with strange broadband issues to see if you have heard of similar (not cable).

Networked desktop and wireless lappy started having the same problem at the same time. Sympton started as not able to hit certain web sites while others were fine, just getting page could not be displayed. These were sites that he could hit before and to his knowledge nothing had changed but he has auto update for MS turned on. Cleared cookies and turned down security setting, nothing changed. Tried to restore but same, tried to ping sites but timing out. When trying tp do a trace route would go to 3 levels of ip's and them time out. Have flushed the dns and reinstalled the router but makes no difference.

Has phoned his isp (Orange) but language barrier and untrained staff meant he could get no help there.

Does it sound like an isp issue to you?

Cheers

 

Primmo, I'm a techie also and on the 10m connection... although since we had the HD box fitted the connection appears slower..can't get any test server to read above 5Mb, although trying the blueyonder games server you rerecorded its around 600KBps now that seems a bot odd.. is it BL's links out that are the problem or what...

Daz

 

firstly its PIMMO

HD wouldn't cause such a drop in speed!! The BY server is there for downloads and if your getting faster on it, its becuase the other servers are ****!

600KBps is a bit slow, do a ping and let me know the results packet loss etc. Also do you have a router? if so try connecting directly and doing the speed test again, BY will only accept speeds results from our server as we know its good!

 

ta Pimmo...
got it right this time...

ok tried six downloads from the server, and they do average around 600KBps...
as for the ping test, i always use bbc.com as the yardstick...
results below...


around 50ms packet loss is ok...

daz

 

ok, there is an issue there, you have two choices you can pm you account number which is a little er... risky for me, but I'll check your connection and the area to see if there are any known issues, or you can call us up and just tell them your getting 600 from the gamefiles and high pings, be sure to mention you have spybot and another spyware running, your netstat is showing as 3 or 4 connections and you dont have a router and they'll be more than happy to help !

Phone number, account number, address or even the MAC address from your modem and I can help you, completely understand if you'd rather call up, I would too