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They merely introduced guidelines as part of the terms and conditions of service to protect their network.

Disclaimer: I work for ntl

ADSL where available either direct from BT or several resellers (there are loads more). 512 down / 128 up costs about GBP 30.00 / month give or take.

There are two major cable operators in the uk, ntl: and Telewest. Both offer cable modem in almost all areas of their networks for about GBP 25.00 / month for 512 and 40.00 / month for 1M.

ntl couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Dude, if you're an NTL sales rep, go home. You've done your work here, anyone that may have bought NTL's service has now bought it. But if you're not, then you should shut the fuck up, because there are plenty of people giving evidence to the contrary!

In other words, they're not going to nail me just because I downloaded all 5 RedHat disks today.

True. But apparently, if you download 2 disks today, 2 disks tomorrow and the third the next day then you may well get a slap on the wrist, as you might have gone over your 1gb limit three times in a two week period.

I've been staying on top of this right over the weekend (and had a /. story about it rejected 36 hours ago, grrrrr), so for those new to it, some links:


Massive thread on nthellworld.com, a offical ntl gripe site.

Complaint site

Basically, ntl are somewhat losing their nerve. I've exchanged emails with the MD of their home products range who claims to have only found out about this key strategic business decision on Saturday morning; he's either lying or incompetent, I suggest. The biggest gripe amongst the sane posters (barring all the "I pay for 24/7 and I'm going to damn well get it" breast-beating") is that the 128bps, 600kbps and 1024kps services all have the same download limit, making you wonder why you pay for the higher speed service.

It should also be pointed out that, unlike many other ISP's schemes, NTL offer no FTP mirror service with "free" bandwidth and recently started dropping alt.binaries groups from their newsspool, which is in any event so slow as to be unusable. So for big alt.binaries downloads or Linux ISOs, for example, customers are forced to external sites, pushing up ntl's bandwidth.

The biggest fear is that this is the thin end of the wedge. In the last two weeks, ntl have dropped a few warez newsgroups and introduced a fairly generous cap that won't inconvenience too many people. That's all well and good, but many think it won't stop there; once you get the caps in place and the groups erased, you can squeeze them down and down. ntl is desperately short of cash, newly emerged from Chapter 11 protection, and this would appear to be a beancounter-led efficiency drive that is turning into a PR nightmare.

I was part of a similar revolt over a no-servers line in the AUP a few years back (more info) and ntl backed down and clarified their position with a set of clear-cut and sensible rules. Let's hope that happens again.

We were forced to deal with these clowns in halls at uni because no other ISP dialup numbers would go through the phone system they installed. A really sweet deal from their point of view, and probably for the uni as well, but it sucked for everyone who had to use it.

NTL are the only ISP I know of that had their own hate site in the form of NTHell. Which they then bought out, employed it's creator and turned it into a customer services forum thing.

Cute, huh?

Tim

There is no chance of my ISP every doing this in the UK. They can't arrange for the cable box to be fixed. They can't get my bill right after 12 months of me telling them that I do in fact pay by direct debit and they shouldn't be charging me a levy. They can't even pick the phone up after 10^6 rings...

What chance do they have of recording all my web page visits and emails?

http://www.nthellworld.com/

Similarly, Digital Spy and NTHellWorld are pretty good for coverage of NTL cable services.

Actually (hides face in shame) I would have loved an AOL Linux client a while ago. My family used AOL at the time because a) it was cheap and b) it worked freecall with the UK cable network. An AOL client would have been great - unfortunately there wasn't one of course so we had to leave AOL and switch to NTL World which are pretty bad, worse even than AOL!

So while they may have a point now, the makeup of 'Linux people' is changing, and is moving further away from the geek demographic all the time. thanks -mike