Me try out Tiscali

[orkboss]

At the beginning of this year my local exchange final got the upgrade to enable broadband. (UK)
After the appalling service from Wannadoo for the dial up diconnection every two hours service I am not using them as my sevice provider. I thought I would try out Tiscali as they have a 1Mbps package at £15.99. It is restricted to a 2 Gb download limit but I cant see that as a problem at the moment, the cost for additional Gb is small at anyrate. Tiscali provide a modem for this set up as well but most service providers do this. I expect it is of an external modem type. As an added bonus my local weekend and national calls are free which makes the other half happy.

[gtaylor]

Urghhh, not Tiscali. In my experience their customer support is lousy. Also, they use DataStream rather than IPStream, and their service is therefore generally a lot slower than others. As your exchange is newly enabled, you'll probably get a half-decent service to begin with but will slowly decrease over time to a real pain in the ****.

My personal preference currently would be for carphone warehouse as they offer good talktalk phone packages with their broadband and the service is good at the moment. Apparantly some people have had problems with their customer service dept, but you'll be fine if you get it installed OK.

[G]

Tiscali are junk. I was taking them to court until they bottled it and paid up. I would never ever use or recommend Tiscali.

Go with Pipex 512/256 (and may be going up soon). They are more expensive but the service for residence is the same as if one were a commercial concern – exemplary.

500 Solo unlimited is £23.99. I can go way over 2GB in a couple of days so this would be no good to me.

Cancel man, it will end in tears. Billing and tech support is 50p a minute from Tiscali. That is how they make their money and a poor service means more tech calls and more profits. You see there is no incentive to improve, as it will cost them dearly.

I had to set up a Tiscali BB connection for a neighbour recently. No problems there. Well no yet anyway.

[orkboss]

G from across the water

May I ask what you were taking tiscali to court for?

I understand that tiscali charge 50p a minute for there tech support but what tech support will i need. I think the expense of charging 50p for enquiries over billing should be made illegal.

[gtaylor]

I can't speak for G, but trying to sort out my father in-laws connection to Tiscali was an absolute ball ache. They hadn't billed him for 18 months, the speed had gone down the toilet and regularly disconnected/wouldn't connect. To be fair to them, they eventually conceeded that they were giving an awful service and gave loads of money back. He now gets a great reliable connection from carphone warehouse, regulary clocking at over the 512k/256k supposed limits, so it wasn't the line or the exchange, just Tiscali being bad. That one nearly went to court too, we were about 2 days from instructing lawyers.

They got too big for their boots, signed up too many customers without the infrastructure to cope with it and have suffered really badly ever since.

[urdvurk]

It may not be very relevant to you, but we've got our own Tiscali story over here. Apparently they were giving away free modems and charging no connection fee with DSL connections (like every provider here) but required customers to pay for it first, after which Tiscali would refund it.

Unsurprisingly they've been reluctant to pay up, requiring customers to take action to get their money back. Our local consumer organization, the Consumentenbond, has stepped in to act as a mediator. They are also receiving a lot of complaints about Tiscali's tech support responding slowly or not at all to questions.

50p per minute for a tech support call doesn't seem like much until you have a problem that takes a long time solving.

[orkboss]

As I had already applied at the start of the link I thought I would see what happened. First I received two email shortly after signing up confirming my application. Five days later I received a letter confirming my order showing all my relevany passwords and usernames. The letter also stated that I should get a 'go live' date within fourteen days. After what everyone had said in the forum I did not expect Tiscali to be on time.

Twos days later I received a letter from BT informing me that I am no longer using them for my telephone calls. Good BT are expensive. Also on that day I received a letter confirming my 'Go live ' date as being next week.

I still had not received a modem so I was begining to get worried. Wanadoo was however playing up bad with constant disconnection. I was getting so sick of wanadoo appalling connection, it was faster than AOL's dial up but so frustrating with the numerous disconnections.

Two days before my starting date and I was getting worried. I had no modem and I thought I was going to get billed for a broadband service I could not use. Then later that morning a parcel arrived with the modem cables and filters and cd.

Things were looking good. All the instruction stated was install the cd and follow the instruction. Thinking that the tiscali service was like aweful wanadoo and its own connection software I inserted the cd and a message came up @unable to run application'. I flaffed around a bit explored the cd ried opening the start up program direct and it still would not have it. I then changed the settings to open the application as a windows 2000 program and success the application started. It went through the process of trying to install connection settings I guess but failed and the try to install the modem drivers and failed.

I uninstalled all that had been installed so far and connected to the tiscali site. I could not find its own connection program but found the connection settings so set up my connection manualy. I downloaded the drivers from tiscali and promptly got the drivers working fine.
To get connected to broadband I did need a longer ADSL cable as the one supplied was only about 2m long. I needed at least 7.5m.
The next day I went to a local computer supplier and got the cable for £8.99 which would have been the same price buying on line the only difference being I had it now rather than next week.

I plugged in all my connnection I off I went. I had never used Broadband until this time and I was so pleased at how quick things were. No more waiting so quick. The last time I had been this impressed with my computers performance was when I changed an ISA graphics card for a Voodoo 3 3000. So far I am pleased with my tiscali connection.

[gtaylor]

I'm glad you're pleased, and I really do hope you don't encounter some of the problems I have heard about them.