Do you have NTL 750Kbps Broadband? I have. Today I just noticed something rather dubious about it.

The 750Kbps service, until today, was costing me £24.99 per month. That’s curious because looking at this page for £24.99 I should be getting a 2Mbps link, that’s 2000 Kpbs instead of 750Kbps. I wondered if I might be being diddled.

I was therefore also pleased to read here that NTL is in the process of upgrading me, so I called them to ask if it had happened already, and if not, when I could expect it.

The nice man on the phone (Craig) told me that in order to receive the 2Mbps service I’ll need a new Samsung set-top box (STB), because my old Pace STB cannot handle the higher speed. THis is fine by me. Craig then looked at the schedules for getting me a new STB – the earliest installation date turned out to be a mere nine weeks hence.

I registered my disgruntlement with Craig in a polite verbal way, and he said I shouldn’t worry because he could put me onto the 1Mbps service immediatly saving me £7 per month.

That’s a faster service, for less money. I’ll be calling them again tomorrow, now that I’ve regained my composure, to ask about a refund for the intervening service time that I’ve paid over the odds for.

Update:Having chatted on the Digital Spy NTL forum, it seems there’s more to this than meets the eye. The 1Mbps serice a slower upstream link, so for doing things like sending large emails or committing my code to the uni’s servers when working from home (where large libraries may be involved) things will now be 20% slower. On the the download side however, i.e. most browsing, will be 33% faster. The possible nail in the coffin is that this service is now capped at 3Gb per month. I doubt I’ll go over that, but it was “nice” of the man on the phone to entirely fail to mention these differences.