Dear Sir/Madam,

I have resorted to writing to you because I have tried countless times and over numerous hours to sort out my disconnection over the phone but with no success. This has not surprised me as since I have been with NTL from June 2005 I have had countless problems with line connections and customer service. 

I have never been with a digital provider before and when we moved into our house we discovered that the previous owners had been signed up with NTL so we decided to do the same thing as the plugs and cables were already installed. We knew that we would want it for less than a year as we were always leaving the country the following April. We specified this to the NTL salesman as we could not commit to a year's contract. He replied that it would be fine if we were moving out of the country as the contract was only binding if we were staying within the UK.

I notified NTL on the 14th March 2006 that I would like to end the contract as our final leaving date was confirmed as the 7th April and they said it would be fine but we would still be charged for the full year. When I told them what our original salesman had said they said that this has since changed and is no longer the case and we now have to pay. I don't think this is a reasonable answer, do you? I agreed to the contract on the condition that we would not be hit with any penalty charges as we knew - and made it clear to you - from the outset that we were only here for another ten months. If that was not suitable for you, we would never have joined NTL.

I would also like to alert you to the problems we have had with NTL over the past 9 months which include:-

Your phone lines are constantly busy and we are often on hold for up to 10 minutes no matter what the time of day. Your message is along the lines of "We are experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment..." I would say that since I hear this every time I call you, this is a usual volume of calls, and you are perhaps unusually short staffed.

When I do finally get through, your customer service representative will verify my details, only then to pass me on to another department that will start from the beginning and verify my details again. One call, I had to verify my account number and password three times. All the time while I am on hold I have the pleasure of listening to a voice recording telling me how NTL has improved its customer service and is looking after me!

For 8 months, I was charged by both NTL an NTL World. Only when I noticed and queried this, did I stop it and get a refund. How does that happen?

On the occasion of our final disconnection and settlement detailed above, I waited 5 minutes to be put through to the 'moving home department', I was then transferred to 'customer services' and had to wait 10 minutes and was then told I need to speak to a manager in the 'line disconnection department'. This final time I told the lady I didn't want to be put on hold, she confirmed that she wouldn't do that, and then put me on hold for a further 10 minutes. Finally someone answered. You won't believe who it was - or maybe you will - the same person I spoke to the first time. Do you have any idea how angry this makes me? All we are trying to do is play by the rules and settle up with you, but you have made this nigh on impossible. When this first and third person put us on hold again, and the recorded message about your improved customer service became too much to bear, I hung up. Hence this letter.

You have a forwarding address of someone who can contact us and are welcome to send a bill there for the month of April to the 7th. Don't bother sending one for anything after that. I will ignore it.

I have posted this letter on the internet in the hope that it will discourage other people from getting tied into the web that is NTL and I will persist to warn everyone I hear of who is thinking of using your service just how bad you are and how difficult you make leaving. I will gladly post your response alongside it.

Finally, I arranged on that 14th March call for someone to collect our set-top box on the Friday we left (7 April) as we'd be at home all day. When we went through the quagmire you call customer services last week to finalise this, they had no record of a set-top box collection date, so although we made arrangements for the box to be available for your pickup on Friday, I have no idea whether this actually happened, and if the punctuality of your set-top box collectors is anything like your repair technicians, I doubt it did. My guess is the new tenants, whoever they might be are either watching NTL free of charge, or have put the box in the bin.

Regards

Andrew Lees