back to article Tiscali bandwidth throttling flub fix flops

Tiscali's attempts to restore anything close to reasonable internet service for its customers following a botched software upgrade have failed. Reg readers are still complaining of blockages and pathetic line speeds on the budget ISP. We reported on Monday how some of the most popular internet applications including iTunes, …

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  1. Stephen
    Gates Horns

    Beware...

    I was a customer of Pipex for 3 years and experienced nothing but good service until Tiscali took them over. Pipex upgraded my line speed earlier in the year following a phone conversation with their employees (seems they wanted to update me from the old Solo 1mbit service I enjoyed for so long)

    Bandwidth throttling went crazy on their network in November, WoW was unplayable (among other things) and after being extremely hacked off dealing with issues with Pipex support (who were now operating from a more expensive phone line with their "we value your call" on hold automated services) I got my MAC.

    Pipex retaliated by taking £151 out of my account when I requested the MAC saying I was in contract following the line speed upgrade. I didn't consider myself to be and I sent them a letter with printed proof of all email correspondence regarding the upgrade, no mention of a contract and demanded the money be re-paid and warning that I had already spoken to OFCOM and if they didn't repay I would take it to arbitration.

    They backed down and repaid my money.

    If anyone is still with Tiscali and Pipex, please do yourselves a favour and get your MAC code and do not be afraid to kick up a stink.

  2. Matthew
    Thumb Down

    Pipex -> Tiscali

    After the normal shenanigans with BT, I moved to Pipex in 2002. I was very happy for years, until last summer. Having to regularly spend 10-15 mins on hold in order to contact support (technical and account), I switched too.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Normality has been restored

    "Normal service hasn't been resumed however. The evening logjam was repeated yesterday."

    I disagree, normal service has been restored... they took the easy route and merely changed the definition of 'normal'.

    How it is now is how customers should expect it to continue.

    I'm just glad that I chose not to use their 'service'.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    Tiscali go sloooow

    I have been with Tiscali for a few years - very satisfied with the speed. However in the last month or so the evenings have been a real draaaag, so slow, port 80 stationary, other ports snaily. Last night was a bit faster but still slow.

    If things don't improve quick I'll get my coat and say bye bye tiscali.

  5. jim
    Go

    F2S

    I was with Freedom To Surf for over 3 years.

    Very happy UNTIL PIPEX took over.

    Their excessive bandwidth throttling eventually made me MAC outta there fast.

    Maybe Tiscali have done the same as PIPEX.

  6. fraser smith
    Thumb Down

    Nildram> -> Pipex ->Tiscali

    All becomes clear. I suffered major evening problems over the weekend with my line dropping to <500K when I normally get about 3M.

    I called Nildram (owned by Pipex (owned by Tiscali)) support who assured me that they had no problems and then had me jumping through hoops to trace the problem to my home setup.

    This is the second time this has happened to me, a week in November being the last time.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    @Matthew

    We were using a Tiscali subsidiary here in Holland for a while and things were no different. That said, when trying to contact their Help(less)desk 10-15 minutes spent on hold would have been a delight to me!

    Getting sent around the houses (oh the lovely musak we had to listen to), then getting someone whose Dutch name ALWAYS began with the letter 'M' eventually drove me up the wall.

    That said, if you made them speak English instead of Dutch it quickly became apparent which country they were really based in ; goodness gracious me, yes indeedy......was also nice listening to them struggling to answer simple questions about the Dutch city they said they were working in too ;-)

    ('GO' icon used 'cos we told them to do just that and f..k themselves the second the initial contract was up)

  8. Chris Adams

    Time to look elsewhere, I think.

    Well, I enjoyed a very good service under Homechoice who got snaffled by Tiscali. I'm in the process of re-installing all my software and games onto a new build PC and am downloading an awful lot of patches.

    Well, trying to, anyway. Tiscali have effectively prevented me from doing this.

    My only reason to stay is the TV service I recieve (well, that and the only alternative seems to be Virgin Mediocre). I do have a spare Freeview box, though, so it's not that bad.

    Any suggestions on a decent ISP?

  9. Pin

    Harhar

    "Tiscali's attempts to restore anything close to reasonable internet service for its customers following a botched software upgrade have failed.

    Reg readers are still complaining of blockages and pathetic line speeds on the budget ISP."

    Restore? When I used tiscali it would be as it is currently being described 50% of the time. Useless for doing basically anything (games/downloads, even browsing). Been very happy since I moved away from their useless service. Poor pipex users :(

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    So that explains it...

    All day Saturday my pipex connection was running around 300kbps, I usually get around 3mbps. Speed tested all day and it finally came right late on Saturday night. I was aware of the sle of Pipex, but i stayed as I've been more than happy with their service for 4 years or so - despite paying over the odds and only getting 512kps. I too got the call out of the blue in early December - line upgraded to current 3.1Mbps and a £5 per month reduction in cost.

    The old adage is true - there's no such thing as a free lunch....

  11. Paul
    Thumb Down

    It's not their ownly problem

    I don't know about the throttling issues, as my only experience of Pipex is at work, but we have had terrible issues in the last few months with our Exchange server that occured soon after Tiscali's take over.

    The long and short of it, over half our e-mails were getting killed by a Tiscali spam filter after our Pipex smtp smarthost passed it over.

    Yes, that's right, the Tiscali network wasn't setup to trust Pipex's systems!

    On top of that, once they finally sorted that issue, they've now implimented some form of filtering on the smarthost itself, so despite the mail originating from our static IP address, it STILL refuses e-mails every now and again...

    Just goes to show that Tiscali are indeed the world's worst ISP!!

  12. John Moppett

    I was gone.....

    I am just soooo glad that I saw the writing on the wall, and backed out last year. Pipex had been good for the four years that I was with them, but when Tiscali took over I was outta there, fast!

  13. Spud
    Flame

    Billing Issues

    (1) Since Tiscalli took over i've had random drop outs ranging from 2 minutes to 5 hours and several friends all report the same

    (2) Last April I was informed that their billing system hadn't taken any money out of my account and I owed £90.... I re-set up the direct debit and thought nothing more of it. Received a phone call yesterday saying I owed £320 for 13 months internet that they didn't automatically bill me for.

    (3) My package suddenly went from unlimited to a 30Gb limit without so much as a letter or email

    (4) They couldn't provide me with one Pipex Bill for the phone / internet package as they are different companies and they had different systems ?? WTF ??? So you sell phone and internet as a package, but can't bill in a single Direct Debit and I just noticed that i've been over charged for my phone plus an extra international option ???

    So in short Pipex can suck my rusty usb port ... can't bill ... now can't provide internet access reliably .... can't even communicate with their customers .... and I can't get through to the F**king customer support.

    I am so out of there ......

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    One smug previous Nildram customer

    The moment Tiscali announced the takeover of Nildram(Pipex) I got MAC and went to Zen, top service there chaps. Tiscali are the pits.

  15. Steve Browne
    Pirate

    Ofcom

    Ofcom only act if they receive a number of complaints. The number is indeterminate. So, lets start making complains about how unfair it is to be stitched up with 12 month contracts with a crap service.

    It may be worthwhile complaining to the Office of Fair Trading about these contracts too. Basically, if the service advertised was actually provided then I really cannot see what problems there could be. It seems that there are many aspects of these services which are not included in their advertising, like 15 minutes on hold with an 0870 number whenever technical support are called.

    Call centre locations are another issue. It is absolutely useless going through a standard script when the person working the script has no idea of what they are talking about. Maybe this should be on their advert too.

    So, contact these organisations, Ofcom, OFT and ASA, tell them what is wrong and if enough people do it then some action should be taken.

  16. John

    and another..

    May as well join the "I was with Pipex until..." crowd, except it was my mother who I connected to Pipex (for 4years) as they were year on year one of the top ISP's, until Tiscalli bought them, whith in months the service was down the crapper to the point we asked for the MAC and moved.

    I'm with Demon myself who also for years have been one heck of an ISP, but I have to say that does seem to be floundering these days, I planned her being on Pipex and myself on Demon as we live in wifi range of each other, if one line goes down, its easy to hop back online till its fixed, and a handy side effect is her running linux which I can leech with in a shell using up some of her spare capacity ;)

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Crap

    I've been with Homechoice before and they were as bad as Tiscali (who I am with now).

    I went with Tiscali because I rent a flat and the block of flats has no main aerial (building management are w@nkers) and I didn't want a Sky dish installed, and Virgin was not available in my area (central London).

    Anyway - I have had problems with Homechoice before but they were the only people who could give me TV down my phone line and not have a dish installed, and they are owned by Tiscali.

    I didn't read any of the forums on Tiscali, but then BT Vision is hideously overpriced at £200 installation plus subscription so, I suppose I had little choice if I wanted TV.

    Just for the record, AOL were crap as well, outages, delays when moving home, customer service who had no record of previous conversations etc...

    Tiscali were ok for a bit. Yes of course there were phone calls (average waiting time 15 minutes) to ask why I had no set top box agreement with the 'welcome pack' (which consisted of a cardboard folder and a leaflet telling me which freeview and subscription channels were available). There was the initial problems with having no internet due to Tiscali failing to tell me how to configure my current router (which was from AOL).

    After that though - all fine.

    Then this month they decided to upgrade the 'exchange' where I lived, and shut down my internet and TV. So there were phone calls telling me to reboot, unscrew panel on phone socket and use test socket etc.

    Then they restored my internet and not my TV. So more phone calls, an engineer was booked because one was necessary for a 'screen 4 error' (where Tiscali TV initial greeting screen has a countdown and does not count below 4, then issues a network not found error).

    I sent an email to Tiscali asking what my options for cancelling the TV were and if I would pay less if I used just broadband and phone, or if I switched supplier for my phone and just used the broadband.

    An engineer called not long after that to confirm the appointment that had been booked (which incidently, is only during work days 9-5 for a 'screen 4 error' which is what happened with the TV). He advised me to turn on my set top box. It was working.

    He advised that an engineer is not necessary for a 'screen 4 error' and that Tiscali had probably just reconditioned my phone line, which is what they do to fix that problem.

    Nice.

    Now for those of you who talk optimistically of obtaining MAC codes and escaping your current ISP and migrating to greener pastures - I wanted to do that while I was with AOL UK and lately wondered if I could do the same with Tiscali.

    You cannot do this if you, like me, are on a 12 month contract.

    When I cancelled with AOL UK they offered me a lower monthly subscription with free evening and weekend calls included in the same price I was paying for my broadband - the reason they said was that now I had paid the full Silver package price for 12 months they had subsequently recovered the cost of the wireless router they had given me for free when I subscribed with them and so could offer me a better price.

    I would rather pay for a router (the old looking and weaker signal generating Thompson Tiscali router is not as good as the AOL Netgear router) and have no minimum term contract than be chained/shackled to an ISP I joined and found I didn't like.

    I can migrate for free between phone providers providing I have a phone line already installed (only BT install phone lines incidently, nobody else seems to) and I do not need a MAC code or to buy myself out of my contract (which could cost £200 or more).

    They should ban minimum term broadband contracts - that is what they should do.

  18. Damien Jorgensen
    Gates Halo

    Thickos

    Why not just change ISP. Tiscalli has always been a pile of crap.

    Pipex was never really that much better, I recall their prices 10 years ago and the price didnt match the service.

    So why not give good old BT a call, or how about Demon? At least their service works

  19. Bo Pedersen

    so thats why........

    They called me yesterday and offered me FREE broadband

    basically I am on the old Pipex xtreme service 4 or 5 years

    their homecall division has asked me to switch (since I have my phone contract with them) a few times. I had resisted not wanting to upset my wonderful pipex connection which has to date been amazingly stable and reliable.

    The Tiscali buyout was not welcome news as I had been a Screaming.net customer (the one that went to worldonline then to tiscali) that through them went from a free dialup service to £15/month!!!

    so I have requested my MAC to xfer to the "other" pipex. and now have my doubts, as me and my youngest son play HL2 games online

    I think I will have a chat with them when they call me this evening.

  20. Chris Miller
    Thumb Up

    Nildram still OK for me

    As a long-term (and very satisfied) Nildram customer, I still get a very solid 6-8Mbps. I did suffer a 20 minute dropout at noon last Thursday, which was very unusual in my experience. And I can still pick up the phone and get through to an intelligent human being in Aylesbury.

    I wonder for how much longer, though :(

  21. Grant
    Happy

    @ Michael

    I have steered clear of the "free router and sign up for 12-18 month" deals, currently with a smaller outfit on a months notice (after the first three months) and was happy to buy my own router. At least I know what I am getting - not like the first free wireless router my neighbours got which didn't work (cos there was no wireless in it), the replacement (which was wireless) which broke after 2 months and the second replacement which barely lasted the contract term.

    Every supplier should off a tariff for those who supply their own equipment - chances are those people will save them money in support costs because they know how to troubleshoot anyway. Of course the companies probably make quite a bit off their support lines...

  22. Phil Launchbury
    Alert

    re: Thickoes

    >So why not give good old BT a call, or how about Demon? At least their service works

    I'd give Demon a miss - they are suffering from many of the same problems (server outages, inaccessible helpdesk, unhelpful helpdesk (when you do get through) and the inability to run a billing system).

    Which is why I've just got a MAC from them and signed up with IDNet.

  23. Dave Bell
    Flame

    Some things don't change....

    Yes, I remember Demon's problems, which started when they were taken over by Thus.

    I didn't have huge problems myself, but I could see the change in attitude to the customers as the mushroom farmers took over.

    I haven't had big problems with Tiscali. but maybe I've been lucky that nothing's gone wrong. Maybe it's just that I'm on a low-speed contract.

    The reversal of the software change even seemed to work, last night.

    Yes, they're over-advertising their capacity. They're selling a service which, for a significant part of the day. they cannot provide. And their salemen are damnable liars.

    Are you guys trying to watch <i>Torchwood</i> from the BBC's website? Are the days of streaming media over?

    Sure, I'd love 8Mbits/s. I'd settle for a reliable 24/7 1Mbit/s. I don't even mind the peak-time throttling of P2P. You're not expecting immediacy with that. I might even be, by some definitions, a "heavy user", not that Tiscali have ever told me I am.

    But, yeah, if this "peak time" was the only time I could sit down at my PC (instead of watching <i>Eastenders</i> ) and use the internet, I'd be pretty pissed too.

  24. b166er

    Want enlightenment

    Get your MAC and call Zen. Not the cheapest, but unfaltering service (and I guarantee you'll never look like reader John). While I was with them, my line only ever dropped 3 times, and that was in the first week. Every time I called them, I was answered within 5 rings and by a very competent polite person in Lancashire. I have 2 friends who are still with Zen, some 6 years now, refusing to leave for better offers (unlike myself, I knew I'd regret leaving them at the time but was lured by 'up' to 16mb with Bulldog), they remain on 512kb.

    The second worse customer service experience I've ever had was dealing with Pipex (my first broadband provider in 2000) I escalated my issues to the top and was blatantly lied to by the CEO! Demon were outstanding as a dial-up ISP, but went downhill after Thus acquired them.

    When I move house in a weeks time, I'm going to try Freeola who use Entanet, as I've heard great things about Entanet (and I have a domain hosted with GetDotted). They also have a no minimum term contract, so if they're no good I can finally return to Zen.

    As always, a visit to www.thinkbroadband.com (formerly adslguide.org.uk) is a good idea.

    Good luck and remember, it's worth the extra fiver a month never to look like reader John!

  25. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    @ Chris Miller

    I'm impressed - finding anything resembling a human being in Aylesbury is difficult enough - finding an intelligent one is unbelievably lucky!

  26. John
    Boffin

    @b166er

    I already don't look like that, it's just a picture I found when I was looking for a big FAIL image to send to my sister and I thought more Reg stories should have image macros, not just Andrew Orlowski's ones. I am ginger, not just as thin and hardly ever use either of my CRTs (though I don't know what to do with them now) and I use a black MacBook.

    Back to the topic: surfing in Opera is going OK tonight (reading icanhascheezburger.com to test the bandwidth)

  27. Pete
    Flame

    This is why we just switched

    .. away from Tiscali (pretending to be Pipex) and over to PlusNet. Our service become appallingly bad, with many services being effectively unusable, from about November.

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Update

    I think Tiscali have done more meddeling with the exchange again - because my internet was iffy this evening and the TV has another 'screen 4' error.

    Contacted Technical support and told them what happened and what happened last time to resolve the issue, and what their engineer had told me after he had been booked - that Tiscali sorted the problem at their end by reconditioning my line and that he didn't need to come round after all; which was correct.

    Technical support said no, the line was fine and they would have to book an engineer.

    So I am going to phone the cancellations department tomorrow and get them to send somebody to collect the set top box because I'm cancelling the Tiscali TV. I'm going to change phone providers - and then demand a reduction in the cost of my package as it will be reduced to broadband only.

    I will demand a reduction to 2mb speed, as that is pretty much what I can expect from most ISP's these days.

    Should save myself money and trouble.

    I'll see if they manage to do all that, and if they don't then I will be writing letters to Ofcom, OFT, ASA and BBC Watchdog with a list of my problems.

  29. Slaine
    Flame

    Time to call "Trading Standards"

    The term you need to use on Tiscali is "Fit for Purpose"... which, patently it is not. It took me 6 months of being fed on bull5h1t before was able to extricate myself from Tiscali, 6 months during which time I had to move my 'puter, replace wires, install 3rd party software, jump through flaming hoops AND all this was only after I finally gained success in contacting them when I resorted to "registered snailmail". Even with that there was an adventure with a vicious debt collection agency over a monthly sub that went missing and not one of these sources of pain ever offered an appology of any sort. In the end it was a delightful lady working out of my local "Trading Standards" who helped to finally put all that misery behind me.

  30. kerr smith
    Stop

    Avoid Tiscali at all costs

    I was also unfortunate enough to sign up to Tiscali. Immediatly I noticed that in the evenings at the same time every day my broadband speed would drop from about 6Mb/s to dial up speed and all ports except web and email were blocked. I could not use FTP, play online games or go on IRC or do anything other than go on the web at a very very slow speed. I began to complain and wrote constant messages in their forums. In the forums the moderators admitted they were blocking ports and slowing connected to try and stop P2P use but when Icomplained via telephone the Indian operators would repeatedly deny this. In the end I complained to the ISPA and received a call from someone in Tiscali's UK high level complaints department, he admitted he knew nothing about the technicalities of how their system worked. Eventually I managed to get my MAC code and he cancelled my years contract which I was only three months in to. I changed ISP and instantly had high speed broadband all day and night and could at last play online games, use FTP and go on IRC. My advise is to definitely avoid Tiscali unless you are prepared to spend hours on the phone to their customer support in India having to perform the same computer and modem tests repeatedly as they refuse to admit it is their fault the speed and connection is extremely poor.

  31. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where to go from here

    Folks, I'll share with you some personal experience and recommendations from colleagues.

    I have had a Demon connection myself for at least 5 years and it's rock solid. Incredibly even when there was a partial earth fault on my phone line that rendered telephony useless, it still worked. Demon are not in the numbers game of signing up as many residential subscribers as possible. They target (and price accordingly) the person or companies who need a quality connection for teleworking. I know personally some senior individuals in that company of old and they know their stuff.

    At least three of my colleagues use and would recommend BE

    http://www.bethere.co.uk

    They love the performance (they have invested in decent core capacity) and again they are not trying to do the triple or fourplay nonsense. They have a range of products for a range of prices but the low end product is still very good.

    Who to avoid

    I could sum this up very simply, anyone in the game of the all in nonsense of phone, TV, broadband and mobile (now includes Tiscali) My brother in law for example has a service with Freeserve/Wannadoo/Orange (enter crap brand you want to abandon here) and has had it from the days when it was Freeserve. On a number of occasions they've done things like change the CHAP password on his account without telling him, only then to deny having done so when he phones the helpdesk which has probably been off-shored by now.

    Next door neighbor and another mate have Cabletel/NTL/Virgin Media (enter crap brand again you want to abandon here). Very critical about their customer support (sic) when they need it.

    Haven't heard about Sky yet, however given that it's Easynet underneath I could tell you one or two horror stories about their corporate business attitude/service but then I'd expose myself.

    And finally Tiscali. Over the past few weeks they've had a reasonably brutal "night of the long knives". Most people had to re-apply for their jobs and for quite a few, didn't get to keep them. So expect a climate of low moral among the survivors. It's all about lowering cost in a market where you are selling a commodity product. In order to do so, they will aggressively rate limit certain types of traffic especially peer to peer (every provider hates it). Where Tiscali, and for that matter any other LLU ISP, have not unbundled an exchange, they collect traffic from from BT wholesale over what are known in the trade as centrals. Tiscali get billed on a usage based charging model I believe to be the 95th percentile of peak utilisation on these links over a particular month. So today it's peer to peer that they will target, but with these costs in mind it's not unreasonable to expect that they will target other traffic types in the future.

    Regards to all.

    (An industry insider)

  32. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Sounds like Virgin Media...

    .. as their service crawled to a staggering 200kb/s in Sheffield last night.

  33. Liam O'Flaherty
    Joke

    @Anonymous coward

    That's nearly twice as fast as the shite the virgin mediocre puts me thru. I'm nearly always cut to 1Mb/s, from 4 (when they advertise throttling to 2), when I supposedly have downloaded over 700MB when in reality I upload about 100MB per day due to their ridiculous UL rate and have DL's absolutely diddly squat!

    Hope the rest of you long suffering ADSL sorts get better service as well.

    Fight the power etc

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    @Slaine & @ Steve Browne

    Done. After they basicaly refused to cancel my TV aspect by phone, I wrote letters.

    Sent letter to Tiscali, Ofcom and OFT with a printout of my forum posts, sceen dump of my logged in status on the forum to prove the posts were mine, screen dump of their advertisement for the £24.99 package, and their emails to me telling me that they could not see any mention of the TV being part of my 12 month broadband contract or having a contract attached to it - see this Tiscali forum thread to find out more;

    http://www.tiscali.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=141906

  35. hans
    Joke

    It aint the Hoff

    With the Hoff pipex could do anything, and now what are they doing, unable to deliver crawling around the floor looking for scraps...

  36. Chris Cheale

    Must be lucky I guess...

    When it comes to ISPs - I was with Freeserve -> Orange a few years ago and had no problems. Although I did have to ring them up when they connected new subscribers at 2meg for the same price as 1meg for existing customers - they basically said they are rolling it out to everyone eventually but for existing subscribers those that put a query in about it got the upgrade first - *bing* few days later 2 megs for the same price.

    Moved house about 18 months ago, signed up to Telewest (now VM) and so far *touch wood* have had no problems - regularly, on a good server, I lurk about the 480kb/s range (which is about right for a 4 meg connection - theoretical top speed of 500kb/s) - if you bear in mind that the connection speed is quoted in megaBITS not megaBYTES, 8 bits in a byte and all that.

    At worst my connection speed drops to about 90kb/s, which is pretty poor (sub 1meg connection) but that normally seems to be due to congestion at the server - visit another server and it'll jump back up to 400+.

    I'm not saying that Tiscali are good or bad, never used them - nor Demon etc etc etc. Just please bear in mind that the bottlenecks are moving - server congestion is now a bigger issue than the connection from your house to the exchange... up the bandwidth on that bit as much as you like, it'll make no odds if the servers are drowning.

    On some games servers (TF2, CS:S etc) I get "warning, connection problems" and lag spikes - jump to another server and nothing, smooth and consistent <20ms latency... it's not always the connection at your end.

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Fun with Tiscali

    Trying to migrate away from Pipex due to the Tiscali effect. New provider (Be) couldn't process the order due to there being an existing order on the line.

    After endless phone calls to Be, Pipex, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and Ofcom, no one could tell me where this mysterious order came from.

    Transpires that Tiscali are migrating me to LLU (noone told me.) Took a lot of effort to get Pipex to admit this. This counts as a new order so Be's order can't be processed. Aaargh!

    Wish I had got out sooner but was under contract!

  38. trevor hopkins
    Flame

    Nothing unusual for Tiscali

    Given that it took them over 6 weeks to resume provision of my ADSL service following a failure of their DSLAM at Milton Keynes in the summer of 2007 and my discovery that they had no kind of SLA with BT nothing surprises me anymore.

  39. Mark
    Paris Hilton

    Plusnet

    If you're on Plusnet (or quite a number of other ISPs) there's a fair probability that you'll be on a Tiscali LLU, despite Plusnet being owned by BT.

    As I'm currently on a contract at Tiscali, and have worked in the past for BT (and others), I can't say too much, except to observe that they don't seem to have any more (or less) problems than any other ISP.

    Paris Hilton chosen because I'd always like to have Paris.....

  40. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Technology advances...

    Over the last few years as technology has advanced we have gone from the old connections that chugged along at a mere 2Mbit 24/5 (512k for cheaper packages), to "ADSL MAX", the vast improvements in technology and excellent increases of bandwidth mean that we are now able to enjoy up to* 8Mbit connections** 24/7***

    * theoretical maximum, at times 56k, other times goes as fast as 256k

    ** if you can call it that

    *** excluding between the hours of 1am and midnight

    how could you not love the advances in Internet access over the years?

  41. ElFatbob

    Tiscali, Pipex et al = steaming pile of ***te

    I'm a relatively new Pipex customer,

    Everything was fine until 3/4 weeks ago when Tiscali ported pipex customers over to their completely crap network. Result?

    My 'up to 8mb' connection currently running at 512k (think broadband speed test)

    i-Tunes is sh@gged between 6-11pm

    likewise Call Of Duty 4 on the Playstation 3

    And despite what they say, they are throttling everything.

    hard to believe a sevice can be so shite. Going through 'customer escalation' procedure to try and get MAC without penalty, which is remainder of contract (9 months) times monthly charge (22.49gbp)!!

    So here i am, i either pay over 200gbp for a service i am not getting or continue paying 22.49gbp for 9 months....errr for a service i'm not getting

    wankers

  42. Nick Moon
    Unhappy

    Disappeared from RADIUS server

    First post - things are that bad!

    Reading all the recent moans, I decided to request my MAC code Monday and get the hell away from Pipex. Last night my router wouldnt authenticate.

    Tech support told me this morning (I was very polite for a change) that my account details had been removed from their RADIUS server! Fortunately my line hasnt yet been LLU'd though I'd rather have a slow connection today than no connection. Good job I have a 3G card :-) 2-4 hours to wait for my connection to be restored.

    By the way the following 0845 numbers are valid until 1st Feb:

    Customer care - 0845 077 2455

    Leaving Pipex - 0845 072 2865

  43. Slaine
    Happy

    @ Miike (Michael)

    ...nice one mate, another strike for justice.

  44. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    @Slaine

    Those giving the scripts to the Technical support department and customer care department will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes! ;)

    Oh - I forgot to add that I sent the same complaint letter package to the ISPA as well yesterday (as an afterthought).

    "I'll show 'em the wrong end of a ragman's trumpet - see if I don't!"

    "Buggrem!"

    (above quotes taken from Terry Pratchett's discworld character Foul Ole Ron)

  45. Tom Kane
    Go

    Tiscali Melt down

    I was experiencing a few problems on my broadband getting only 700k on a 2 Mg download service.

    Since they offered an upgrade without any increase in cost, I took the 8Mg package.

    It was apparently finished last Friday and to date my average download speed has achieved the dizzy hieghts of 1.3 Mg but averages 750k with a low point of 35k.

    Reported this to them and they gave some ridiculous answer about confirming my upgrade but totally ignoring the poor performance. To add insult to injury they stated that I should wait a further 7 days before going back to them. Aye that will be right!

    Sent them a pointed little note saying less of the corporate gibberish and escalate immediately to tech support. If its not fixed by the start of next week then I am off to Demon. At least I know how to get things sorted out in Demon

  46. tom

    Be*

    Be (now owned by O2) have been great a long time - freephone support, 15mbit downstream, 1.3meg upstream. It just works. Yay!

  47. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Pipex are now useless!

    Pipex migrated me to their LLU Tiscali network on the 15th of Jan and since then nothing has worked properly, I couldn't connect as they didn't tell me I needed to change my encapsulation. MSN messenger never now connects and I can't send emails using my pipex account.... I have had appalling customer service with regards to logging and correcting the fault.... they didn't seem to care or even log the fault when I phoned them on 3 occasions so now I’ve given up with Pipex/Tiscali as I don't think they will ever fix my problem. I'm going to use another ISP.

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