During the past three months I have had amazing problems with the Digital TV service. I have now found a way of getting some action!

e-mail the ntl Group MD, he replied yesterday!

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

Answers

My father in law wrote to him too, and got instant answers and progress. He'd had his problems with the internet access thro' tele thing they had which was appalling.

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

I don't bother with the Internet through TV because it is limited in terms of the sites it offers i.e. No BBS!

The quality of the signal has been very crap and has been unresolved for about three months now. The MD has now got the Consumer Services Director and the Customer Sales Manager involved by copying them into the e-mail! I am impressed.

I have to say their Internet Access is superb, reasonably quick and totally free, although it cuts ouy after 2 hours use which means for the webcast you have to re-connect just before kick off to ensure you don't get cut off in the dying minutes of the match. I'm not sure the MD would be bothered about that though.

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

I've got Telewest phone lines/cable TV. I forget - are they owned by NTL or are they rivals? I'm thinking of getting 'Active Digital' which is their Dig tv service - is that what you've got De B?

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

NTL have merged/taken over Cable & Wireless. I think Telewest is still a seperate entity so I have no idea what their Digital TV will be like.

When my Digital TV service is working it is an excellent picture far superior to the previous cable or roof aerial reception. The way in which you can check what's on TV etc is excellent. It's just the number of faults that I have had that makes me think you should go with Sky.

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

Dan

I've got Telewest/NTL Digital Cable and to be honest the break up and freezing of the services over the christmas perdiod has been terrible.

It is particularly noticable on the music channels MTV, MTV1, MTV Base, VH1 The Box etc....whcih are the ones my daughter usualy inflicts on us, but they keep jumping and freezing.....its often like and old record player on an unsteady table top when somebody walks past

As part of the service we get activemail but unless you spend £30 on a remote keyboard the on-screen 'virtual' keyboard is a bit of a dead loss....alright for short one two or three line messages, but beyond that forget it.

Having said that, the interactive service was down for five days over the Christmas/New Year period, and their address book facility is not available thus far.....makes me wonder why I am paying £13 a month!

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

One thing in favour of the Cable service over Sky......with the cable system you don't need to plug in through the telephone line, unlike Sky/On Digital, which have to have a telephone feed.

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

Ta Ken-

Not so fussed about the internetty stuff, but having got cable installed it'd be nice not to have to get a dish etc for dig tv. If the quality of the Active Digital tv service is poor as you say, that's a bit of a worry. I might hang fire for three months or so...

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

ITK,

It sounds like you've been having the same problems as me. The picture going black for five seconds then returning. This has been happening frequently for me recently and I got so pissed off with the whole thing that I e-mailed the MD! (After being patinet with it for a few months and going through all the right channels without a successful solution)

Yesterday an Engineer checked out all my connections to and from the digi-box and found them to be ok. This morning an external engineer turned up to re-feed my cable from the point in the road to the box outside my house. There was a kink in the old cable apparently.

Anyway that is supposed to have fixed the problem of the intermittent signal. I shall tell you more tomorrow after a night's viewing.

If you are sure Telewest are connected to NTL I can give you the e- mail address of their Senior Customer Relations Manager or Group MD, Consumer Division.

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001

If you can mail me that address DB I will keep it for possible future use.

I'm sure they are all one company. In our area, we used to be the Cable Corporation, but they were taken over by NTL and ever since then the NTL, Telewest and Cable Corporation logos appear on the top of their bill and other related paperwork.

Dan: if you are cabled up it may well be worth waiting a couple of months and then going for it, it's gonna get better, but like all these 'new' things, they are in their infancy with digital and get teething problems,

I know I slagged them off a bit above, but for £13 a month I get 73 different channels (alright most of them are crap) but you can usually find somethng to look at, regardless of the time which is great for us TV workers......god even that's coming to an end soon as well........redundant in April after 21 years!

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2001