BB FANS

Does anybody get close to 10M download ?

Fastest I've seen is 962K which based on 1Mbits = 128Kbytes/sec is a little over 7.5Mb

Downloading from a very fast news server (newshosting.com) it should be capable of more.

Modem is the old silver one (NTL Home 100) which is confirmed capable which despite an error message during migration to the faster service NTL says it was successfully. But I did read on DS that the modem requires a firmware upgrade and the modem was rebooted during the upgrade which made me think that was where the error came from. But as per usual unless you use words with no more than two syllables the lack of technical understanding and in some cases the ability to understand simple questions goes out of the window.

My News leeching program is useful as it clearly displays the transfer speeds. The speeds are equal to those displayed by IE with other files.

So do you have the 10Meg service do you know what speed you getting and which modem have you got ?

10mb - capped.
2mb - download all you want.

There remains no real sense in upgrading to the 10mb, many people simply can't get the full speed anyway.

*I'm waiting for 100mb connections to be deployed, no later than mid 2007.
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Larry, it may be settings in your O/S need tweaking to optimise the speed. Have a look at the broadband tweaks at Speedguide.net.

I have a genuine registered version of Tweek Master Pro that made a big difference in the dial-up days. I'll have to dig it out and give it a try.
My network is 100Mbit all round so that should cope.

The capping if I remember correctly is 70GB/Month which most of the time should be ok. It just means if I want to download and episode from a TV show I only need 10 minutes or less and have the PC free to other things. I normal show is around 250MB for Hi-Def ,128MB for Medium to Low Def.
It's not the volume I download but rather the amount of time involved. I'm tempted to go back to 2MB as 3.5 times whilst useful isn't a good as the full 5x .Plus by summer when ADSL2 and other providers are offering far faster services for less than NTL I'd hope they come up with so better pricing.
Also note NTL say 2MB will get upgraded later this year to 10MB for free but 3MB users get it first.

Wow ... NTL are on the ball tonight !
I Emailed the Broadband section of Customer services explaining that I'd decided that I wasn't happy with the current performance of the 10Meg service and as I couldn't find a way via the website could they advice on how to downgrade to 2Meg.
I got the autoresponder Email and went to cook my tea.
In the 3 - 4 minutes I was out of the room the speed has dropped to somewhere around 3Meg .3Meg is 384KBytes/Second and it's currently peaking around 370K.

So far no Email from NTL to say they have changed the service and the other ,slower ,PC is collecting Email every 5 minutes.
Hopefully they are offering 3Meg at the same price as 2Meg else there isn't anypoint is what they've done.

I heard that soon everywhere in the country will be up to 8MB's which is loads I hope my comp will be able to cope with it.

A series of downloads about 1/2 hour ago were back to the 800 - 900K (7Meg ish) download speeds again.

Thought it was odd for them to react so quick.

Yes the country is said to go high speed around the middle of the year with speeds up to around 27Meg.
NTL are playing with 100Meg but that's for their TV services not domestic users. I don't know what the plan to do to compete with the others if they (ADSL2 ?) start offering very high speeds.

7Meg is good ,as I said above a 250MB TV show takes under 10 Minutes to download. But I would have expected the 'up to' 10Meg service to be in the 9 - 10 Meg (1152K - 1280K) region depending in useage.

I will dig out Tweekmaster Pro and see what difference it makes.
As the settings are now with a 2Meg service (256K) I was getting just under 2Meg (240K - 256K).

Still haven't dug out Tweekmaster yet but the other night I installed XP on a mates Laptop and with it plugged in to my network I downloaded anti-virus and firewall software with IE reporting download speeds of 1.25MB/Sec !
So maybe the News server isn't quite as fast as I thought it was.

Anyhow NTL customer services on-line are a waste of time. They just say due to the Data-Protection act we can't do this that or the other you must phone us. Strange you have to give you account details before you can submit an Email to them.
I think there should be a way for the customer to manage their account on-line. You can increase you service but you can't decrease it.
Anyhow the account isn't in my name and we don't have security features set-up to allow me to talk to them. All I can do is ask my mother who's name the account was originally opened in when we first got the phone service to contact then. She unfortunately isn't technically minded and doesn't understand Internet things. She is an OAP who knows how to use a DOS word processor and despite trying to explain Windows she has never come to grips with it. I pity her and NTL trying to communicate.