Well its the 12th of December and NTL have repaired my service.Please no clapping as I know that there are many of you out there still waiting to have your telephone call  answered and I'd say that there is quite a considerable amount of you out there waiting as I did for someone to Call.

It has to be the worst customer service experiences of my life, and while listening to "Newstalk106" this morning it would appear that there are thousands of NTL'ers out there suffering in the same way. To be fair to Brenda Power on Newstalk she did ask NTL to provide someone to field questions from NTL's customers but true to form NTL declined.No surprise there then, it is not only do they allow its customers to be waiting for hours on end on the telephone, they do not have the basic manners to allow people to express their opinions on the service that they get good money for in a monthly basis.

The only way that NTL will listen is for people not to pay for the shoddy service that they are peddling, I appreciate that its difficult for people to do this as TV has become a mainstay of our lives.People could for example stop paying by direct debit and pay for what they receive and not what they think they will receive (your NTL bill is prepaid) to do this either contact your bank or go online, if available, and simply cancel the direct debit,you can then pay for what you received and if you have a problem deduct the amount(pro rata) and email NTL detailing the deductions that you have made, ensuring that you keep a softcopy and a hardcopy on a file to show anyone in the future.A record of your telephone calls should also be kept for reference. I can almost say without a doubt that any email that will be sent to NTL will never see the light of day, and the onus is on them not you, to show that you informed them of your actions. Alternatively you could go to the trouble of paying them a visit as one gentleman did to get results but I think that time may be a constraint.

Finally to all you out there who cannot get through the freephone number here are two more to use 01 245 8600 now I have to say I did not get through on this and when it rang the person on the otherside simply hungup or rejected the call.What I also did was to ring the above number and simply by adding 1 instead of the 0, I got through to a voice mail, at least you might get answered.

 The other number I have is 061 272190 this is a private number of NTL and is nearly always answered but before 5pm.

I've been a UK NTL customer for about 4 years and haven't experienced the problems you seem to be having there. The service is usually ok. My only complaints are with the slowness of the tv guide and that it regularly displays programme information as being "unavailable".

I subscribed for a three in one service, TV, telephone and broadband, after BT alienated me as a customer. At the time BT were apparently applying a commercial policy to periodically drop dial up connections for heavy users who were on a set monthly fee for unlimited usage.

For me the drop always occured at the most inopportune moment, such as sending urgent emails.

Saying this, broadband with NTL seems to have been getting successively worse in recent months with signal strength disappearing completely, still, compared with BT, it's still superior.