> Mike, Are you NTL there? I am here and I have to say despite all the anger
> toward NTL I have had one outage in 3 years, NO moans from me. But I think the
> wqy they squeeze more out is not always through investment which NTL have
> done. Often they just worsen contention ratios. Also NTL are upgrading their
> customers at no charge; I will go from 750 K/bps to 2 Meg soon. with no extra
> charges it is attractive. But the whole thing has to give somewhere and I
> guess some will drop out of business and prices will eventually go up again so
> that the bankers see some return for the multiple bail-outs there have been.
>

Err, sort of - normally I wouldn't touch NTHell with a very long pole.... But, I'm with Virgin Net, who AFAIK basically re-badge and re-sell NTL capacity.
At least I know that now - didn't when I first signed-up (I was in the first 1000 and got the 3 bottles of bubbly :D ).
At least support is not NTHell.

As far as Virgin are concerned, in the early days, they did have a few performance problems, but when I spoke to support they were quite open that they had allocated finance for additional bandwidth - and they clearly did get it. I'm quite happy with the consistant 52-55Kb download speeds I always get when talking to a decent server anywhere.

I'm really in two minds about whether VNet should offer faster links. As I implied earlier, I perfer a _reliable_ middle-of-the-road service at a middle-of-the-road price. In fact I would consider paying a little more if it would secure what I have now for the future. Things may change but that's how I feel now.

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