If you’re considering subscribing to NTL, do yourself a favour and forget the company ever existed.

(it’s about 2/3rds the way down this page)

and a colleague at work will recommend me - then remembered that my car insurance is due this month - so I’ll hold off on the Sky install for a bit, and give NTL another month to muck something else up…

My plans are to switch the TV service only at the moment - I’m not sure my BT exchange here is ADSL enabled - so I’ll keep the phone and broadband with NTL initially - but having looked at Sky in a shop, a few things jump out immediately:

* Interactive stuff Works.
* Teletext Works.
* “MultiFeed” (like Wimbledon, or Sky News) works.

(seeing the theme yet - all the things that don’t work on Cable - or are so slow as to be unusable - seem fine on Sky)

* The picture seems better than I’m used to - although I won’t be able to make a proper comparison until I see it on my TV!
* With a small extra gadget, I’ll be able to get 100% accurate channel changes with TiVo.
* More channels (and therefore more rubbish) to watch for the same money.

To be honest, I’m not expecting the customer service to be any better, but the move is as much a protest at NTL cutting me off with no warning, no contact and no hesitation, despite me having paid, than it is a search for something better.

When she moved out, NTL promised a rebate for the remainder of the month. It only amounted to about £10, but 2 years later she is waiting for the cheque. Although it was a small amount of money, a promise is a promise, particularly from a large company like NTL.

Having said that, BT and I are having fun right now at work. A junction box which controls the line into one the stores was playing up. A quick call to BT who said they will send an engineer out within 4 hours to check the fault. I thought this was prety good service, but decided not to hold my breath! 8 hours later the engineer arrived, and after some fiddling, said that the box needs “serious work done to it”, and the standard policy from BT is “6 months to 3 years”.

Whilst NTL are useless, don’t expect anything better from other companies. >:(

Apparently the switch would still require an engineer to come out and we had to wait over a month before the internet got working since there were so many other house in the area going through the same. With much complaining no actual enggineer came out but a fiddle with the system at their end meant our internet was working. Why they couldn’t have done so a month early I do not know.