Faults Increase?

[James Henry]

Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot more complaints about slow speeds, intermittent connections, packet loss, etc, in the past weeks / months than there have ever been?

I'm sure a few months ago there were relatively few complaints at all, capacity wasn't an issue in most areas, not many complaints about bad reliability at all.

Just a trend I've noticed, probably a result of ongoing lack of maintenance and poor morale within the staff who would be doing this but are being service techs instead.

Do people concur with this?

Oh here's a thought, ntl:Telewest are getting rid of over 100 network engineers. This on a network that serves IIRC around 11 million passed homes. I expect there are a couple of hundred left, probably no more. These guys tend to be fixing faults at customers' homes as a service tech would and only do network repairs they don't do the day to day maintenance only firefight.

Comcast in the USA apparently have over 10,000 network engineers serving a network passing 41 million homes.

[Florence]

You are not wrong but what do you expect when NTL make engineers and network guys redundant.

Saddly the 512K service I started on with NTL was a much better service than they give now. The network was kept to its peak and speeds was 512k. I never see 4mb the highest being 3,75 and as low as 715K. Plus the down times which have gone from once a month to 3 times this month. and still time for perhaps a fourth.

[MovedGoalPosts]

I'm sure there are a lot of factors. Staffing levels will be one, but general budget constraints could be more significant, combined with desire to increase the number of connected customers and eek more speeds from the network.

Lots of people express concern about high temperatures affecting street cabinets. We're into the summer months when we can expect this to have the biggest impact.

But I suspect the biggest reason we see more posts of concern is contacting this forum is free, but it now costs you to phone faults.

[Bill C]

I'm sure there are a lot of factors. Staffing levels will be one, but general budget constraints could be more significant, combined with desire to increase the number of connected customers and eek more speeds from the network.

Lots of people express concern about high temperatures affecting street cabinets. We're into the summer months when we can expect this to have the biggest impact.

But I suspect the biggest reason we see more posts of concern is contacting this forum is free, but it now costs you to phone faults.
It would not surprise me that the problems are down to

1. Less Staff

2. Heat "due to there being NO heat compensation at all and NO active cooling in the cabinets".

3. Over selling and no upgrading.

4. Dodgy modems hitting epidemic levels "so i have been told"

5. Staff moral lower than a snakes belly in a wagon rut.

6. Proxies at a all time crappiness

7. Dns unable to cop with 13 year old script kiddies

[punky]

Is it just me or do there seem to be a lot more complaints about slow speeds, intermittent connections, packet loss, etc, in the past weeks / months than there have ever been?

I'm sure a few months ago there were relatively few complaints at all, capacity wasn't an issue in most areas, not many complaints about bad reliability at all.

Just a trend I've noticed, probably a result of ongoing lack of maintenance and poor morale within the staff who would be doing this but are being service techs instead.

Do people concur with this?

Oh here's a thought, ntl:Telewest are getting rid of over 100 network engineers. This on a network that serves IIRC around 11 million passed homes. I expect there are a couple of hundred left, probably no more. These guys tend to be fixing faults at customers' homes as a service tech would and only do network repairs they don't do the day to day maintenance only firefight.

Comcast in the USA apparently have over 10,000 network engineers serving a network passing 41 million homes.

I'm not an expert by any means, but i'm allowed an opinion so i'll voice it. A lot of problems are probably do to the 10 meg upgrade. That's when things started going downhill for me anyway. The proxies got worse and speeds got worse. Before 10 meg, I recieved a perfect 3. I've since dropped down to old 2 meg tier, and struggle to recieve that. Since I was upgraded to 4 meg, i've been struggling to get that. I am not an expert on this, but I suspect a lot of the problems arising now are due to upgrades being rushed in to an infrastructure that can't, or barely can support them. I have it better than most though. My girlfriend lives in Chesire (not far from Florence) and has a very flakey connection of late, as do a lot of people in south Manchester. In London, my connection may not be the fastest, but at least its up a lot, and pings are very good. Heat always plays a factor too... Almost half way through the summer, and generally been pretty warm throughout...

Regarding Florence's 3 day wait for an engineer... its not unheard of to wait that long before the redundancies. Certainly never used to be summoned to my house overnight anyway.

[Gareth]

Guess I'm lucky with regards my broadband - it has been rock solid, even now at 10Mb.

I'm quick enough to moan about NTL's failures (billing, admin, DTV, etc...) so I'll put my hands up now and say that as far as my broadband goes, they're doing a fine job. It's the reason why I'm still using NTL for broadband, despite having made the switch to Sky & BT for TV & phone.