On Thursday, December 5, 2002, at 07:06 PM, Simon Martin wrote:
I use NTL quite happily. They have recently upped the speed of their basic offering to 600 something mb/s at no charge and the thing works perfectly well. <snip>
They do not support OSX, they only support windoze up to Win95!! ( I believe...) but it's so easy, just ask them for information to enter into a couple of boxes and you're done. Connecting with a Mac is so incredibly easy be it using OS9 or X, over ethernet anyway, you shouldn't have any probs. You don't need any external software.I also have had an NTL connection for the last 5 months and am overall very happy with it. It did take nearly a year to get connected because initially NTL had filled their connectivity for my street. As sod's law would have it, within 3 months of NTL increasing the capacity for my area, BT announced that my local exchange, Twyford, Berks, was one of the first two to be upgraded to ADSL under BT's new "ADSL by demand" scheme.
My memory differs from Simon's - or maybe I misunderstand him. Certainly NTL supported Mac OS9 - in fact I was pleasantly surprised that the customer support agent was himself running an i-Mac at home and was very clued up. So I initially set up in OS9, OSX was thereafter a doddle - I don't think I actually had to do ANYTHING - it just worked. I then installed a Buffalo wireless router, which had to be set up from my PC (although there is also an unsupported OS9 driver for it) which caused some short term problems with the dynamic DHCP - but quickly sorted (not an NTL problem). I now have 3 Macs and 2 PCs running off the same NTL connection.
Since then I have had an almost trouble free experience. A couple of times it has gone really slow (for about 20 minutes each time) and one day last week after they had done a major server upgrade ( I discovered from the recorded message when I rang the help line) I couldn't access my e-mail for a few hours through my NTL connection (not on NTL) though I could through a modem dial up connection to my ISP - but that is probably no worse a record than I have had through any other connection.
There is one annoying thing, NTL seem to cache files over a certain size, which means that when updating web sites I am never totally sure what version I am looking at - but overall I am very happy - and it is VERY good value. Add to that their new phone tariff about to come on line - �25 per month inc rental and VAT for unlimited within UK phone calls, and I am very content.
I really can't comment on ADSL (though other experience has taught to steer well clear of anything to do directly with BT), but other than interface problems with NTL over installation, cable does work very well (and my son in Bristol has had excellent and trouble free Telewest service)
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