NTL World Server Problems.

If like me, you use NTL World as your ISP, you have no doubt come across some network performance which is sometimes so poor it defies belief. Problems with their web and news servers are so common I think something's wrong if I don't get any!

NTL's tech support service is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, so I took it upon myself to try to find a solution. On this page, you'll find two, relatively painless solutions to your http and nntp blues.

1. News
In the 8+ months I've been using NTL, I have yet to get a trouble free days worth of use out of their news servers. Several alternative servers exist, and I can get mixed results by changing the server from day to day, but I shouldn't have to. The answer is http://www.individual.net/ . It's a FREE news server run by the computer center of Freie University Berlin, Germany. You have to register before you can use the server, and registration takes a couple of days because it's done manually, but you do get a free, excellent quality news server with a high number of newsgroups. (text only newsgroups though, no binaries, so downloaders will have to look elsewhere).

2. Web
A lot of NTL users have noticed very poor performance when browsing the web. I got sick of the 404 errors, and sick of switching between all the different proxies. Enter Multiproxy. Multiproxy is a free program which will automatically connect to the fastest available proxy from a pre-defined list, and use that proxy for your web surfing. You tell your browser to ask for web pages from Multiproxy, Multiproxy asks the servers in it's list for the web pages and passes them back to the browser. Multiproxy takes care of deciding which proxy to use and switiching between them. Very simple, and very very effective. Once you download Multiproxy, you'll also need a list of the NTL proxy servers in a format that Multiproxy understands. I've prepared this list using the information found on Robin Walker's excellent site. You can download the list by clicking here (if the list displays in your browser, right click the download link and choose Save As...).

Here's a quick step by step of what's involved :

• Download & install Multiproxy
• Download the proxy server list.
• Start Multiproxy and click options.
• Switch to the tab called 'Proxy server list'
• Click 'menu->', choose 'Files' and then choose 'Import proxy list'
• Find and double click the proxy server list you downloaded.(ntlproxy.txt)
• Click 'menu->', choose Proxy List and click 'Test all proxies'
• You'll see Multiproxy going through the list of proxies, testing each one, once it's finished, you'll get the blank Multiproxy window.
• All that remains now is to tell your browser to ask for web pages from multiproxy instead of directly from NTL. For instructions on how to do this, click here.
• You can minimise Multiproxy to the system tray - you won't even know it's there!

You can also find a list of proxy servers on the Multiproxy web site. It doesn't hurt to mix these up with the NTL world proxies, in fact, it might even speed things up a bit.

Not only has Multiproxy made my web surfing more reliable, it's made it faster too because it automatically uses the fastest proxy server available! Use the 'test all proxies' feature regularly to check which proxies are available and to check their speeds. If Multiproxy helps, please email the author to let him know you appreciate his time and effort.

questions, comments or suggestions? email me.

Please feel free to link to this page.