Ok, it’s not quite as bad as the title makes out.. well actually, yes, I guess it is.
Just had the NTL bill through for this month and it’s about 50% more than normal – the reason for this is that they’ve decided to go from billing 1 month in arrears for broadband to 1 month in advance the same as the phoneline rental. I can see there’s a certain logic to this, but doing it without any warning (that I saw anyway) and charging both months in the one bill is a bit much. It would have been better, although perhaps a little more complicated at their end, if they’d split the extra months payment across two months, going 2 weeks in advance the first month and then the full month in advance after that.

We have the 3Mbps service which to be fair is pretty good apart from the limited upstream which is a mere 256kbps – one twelfth of the downstream. It’s not particularly brilliant for uploading webpages, performing backups to remote servers, all while trying to use interactive ssh sessions to machines elsewhere on the internet. Supposedly they’re going to be upgrading 3Mbps customers to 10Mbps before the end of the year. I just hope we see a suitable increase on the upstream as well otherwise I might have to start looking at alternative broadband products such as regular 2-8Mbps ADSL or this new 24Mbps ADSL.