Ok I have spent an hour or 2 on the phone with various people at ntl today, I got back to the person who helped me back in dec to manage to do this.
Some things dont add up. Regarding my ubr 2 different people checked the stats on it, they told me all the upstream utilisations were averaging around 30-40% the highest been 41% and this was around 6pm and again at 7.30pm. The downstream was utilised at 28megabit he told me the figure but I have no idea what the capacity is but I do know it is a QAM64 so if ignition,bbking or bill or someone else could translate that into a % it would be great but I asked him a clear question is their any type of capacity problems on my ubr and he said no. I was pinging the gateway and it was fluctuating wildly so I asked what about these pings they are not stable and he told me thats normal due to them been treated as low priority and went on to state they dont garantuee latency. (this is bad I dont agree with this I am just saying what he told me). We then went to
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/testmyspeed/ and did some speedtests, I was initially on the 2mbit and the on net test gave me 240-250kB which is good, the off net was also good we tested #3 which is the debian ftp link. I found it unusual it happened to go good today but we then went onto putting my modem on 10mbit and he asked me to reboot. After the reboot and when the modem came back I reran the tests, the on net test came out at around 450kB he then ran it at his terminal and he said he had the same result, the #3 test came out a bit slower at around 300kB and he said he was getting under 100kB. We proceeded to do a download of microsoft service pack 2 and I got just over 150kB this is on 10mbit. He thinks the modem is a problem and I have an engineer coming this friday who will run tests from his own laptop and if needed swap the modem.
Now their was a discrepancy the contact I rang told me every upstream was high utilisation except mine and was telling me ntl wont schedule a upgrade until all 6 are full and that was when I asked her to get it rechecked after 7pm, this was when it was passed onto the tech guy who rang me back around 7.15pm. He was telling me all 6 were low and the highest was 41% and the downstream was at 28mbit. I have also been told by some other people that my upstreams are highly used.
Regarding the proxies I mentioned that I am using colchester proxies or my own because leics is either slow or timesout most of the time and his answer was leics and nottingham have large amounts of customers I was thinking then add more proxies but I didnt want to talk about the proxies a lot as they are easy to workaround anyway.
Right now I am on 10mbit still for testing and its been reeavualated this friday, if they can get it working right I will stay on it and of course pay for it otherwise back down to 2mbit.
The traceroutes and pings are still showing massive fluctuations although speeds are up and my upload runs at maximum flatlined download speeds however are not max but are slowly rising, I can now hit around 800kB to some sites.
I want to rule out my hardware and software setup, I have 3 lan cards on this pc and plan to switch between them between now and friday and format windows on a different hd so I have a clean operating system, I have played with rwin as well and it is currently at 256960 a multiple of mss 1460.
I am not a gamer so if speeds stay above 5mbit for most parts of the day I will be satisfied, for the gamers I do feel sorry for them as it appears their is little sympathy from ntl on this I did mention it but the answer wasnt good news, I can only suggest that when they start enforcing the cap we will all get a better service but the bottom 2 tiers are unmetered so I wonder if a big change will be noticed.