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Originally Posted by BenMcr

It is a hang over from ntl. They had a system that they had built in house that originally did the dial-up internet services for customers. Because it was dial up it was designed to be d/d or card payment only, as no ISP ever paper billed for monthly dial up and PAYG didn't need any bill at all.

They also had about 101 different billing systems (run by people like IBM) for TV and phone (and for some areas STB broadband) for all the companies they had bought.

So they went, "wouldn't it be a good idea to take all those other billing systems and put them on our internet billing system". This was around the same time as cable modem broadband started so they added that onto the dial-up internet system, still with the d/d or card payment only requirement.

However, they only got a 3rd of the way through it and then found out it couldn't really cope so they stopped the move. What this meant was some customers were billed on one (older) system for TV and phone, and on the (Newer) system for cable modem broadband.

When the merge between ntl and telewest happened, Telewest had already completed a migration of the whole of their company onto a single system, so a decision was made to migrate ex-ntl onto the same system (as it could handle all 3 services and could cope with new services like the V+ and Talk Anywhere). So this is what they did.

However because the migration was basically done in reverse of the one ntl attempted, the dial up and cable modem broadband are now the last ones to be changed

Thanks for the reply. Any idea what this is going to mean for me then ? Am I now going to lose my BB for a month because they lied to me ? I buy and sell alot online. losing my BB for a month aint gonna be good for me. I hope they can sort something out or am gonna be F****ed I guess.