Tiscali Broadband

Pete · Mon 27 Feb, 2006 19.40

Yay or nay? Just wondering whether I should put my pootar illiterate friend onto their £14.99 service as it seems rather good value.

Jamez · Mon 27 Feb, 2006 21.25

I ordered Tiscali broadband on February 17th at 10pm.

They're supposed to send me regular email updates about my order, but I haven't had anything. This was 10 days ago now, and according to my receipt email, I should be online and connected by March 5th. :roll:

Salty · Mon 27 Feb, 2006 22.12

I've never ever had a problem with them. Touch wood!

Neil Jones · Mon 27 Feb, 2006 22.55

No problems. My connection issues have all come to the microfilters that have stopped working properly. Replace it and we're back as we were.

Nick Harvey · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 00.03

Tiscali's contention rates are DREADFUL.

Keep WELL clear of them.

You're supposed to get a service at 512k, but it's more like 56k dial-up when you hit the contention on the first multiplexer in the chain.

They are, alledgedly, the slowest broadband supplier in the UK, hence their price being so low.

Don't forget, there's no such thing as a free lunch, especially in the telecommunications world.

stu · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 04.30

Never had any problems with it, although it is rather no frills.

The featureless USB modem you get isn't as exciting as the monolithic Motorola Surfboard I had with blueyonder.

edit - living in farmerland and being from the city, no-one has heard of broadband, therefore the local exchange does not slow down to a crawl

Pete · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 12.10

stu wrote:edit - living in farmerland and being from the city, no-one has heard of broadband, therefore the local exchange does not slow down to a crawl

oh I have that advantage too.

Personally I'm on Pipex at £24 a month but I sit on the internet all day downloading TV shows and other massive files (ISOs and the like).

Said friend at the momeny doesn't use the internet v. much however once he gets BB will (without question) start downloading tons of music and eventually the odd TV show too. Therefore I want to avoid a cap if at all possible (or get a decent sized one like 20gb).

See his mother had gone for AOL (they were on AOL Dial-up) but they have a Mac-a-droid which AOL don't support. I could have made an effort to install it by hand but watching him chastise the mother over the phone for being a stupid bitch was far more worthwhile.

So any ideas from anyone?

cdd · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 18.45

One of my friends uses Tiscali and hasn't had any major problems so I suppose I can reccomend them.

Pete · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 19.51

Luke-H wrote:AOL do support Mac-a-droids, well, you can use it on them. Just tell him to get an ethernet router and there are plenty of sites on Google that tell you how to use AOL without even having to go near their software.

did you not read the bit where I said I ommitted this fact to watch him chastise his mother? Or were you too busy being *wacky* by putting lampshades on your head whilst wearing a Firefox t-shirt (loser)

Aston · Tue 28 Feb, 2006 22.47

I've been with Tiscali Broadband for over two years and don't have one complaint about them. I've never needed to use their customer service as I've never had a problem.

Switching over to a wireless router was easy and the connection speed is as I'd expect from Broadband...

Neil Jones · Wed 01 Mar, 2006 00.29

Aston wrote:I've been with Tiscali Broadband for over two years and don't have one complaint about them. I've never needed to use their customer service as I've never had a problem.

I lost faith in the customer service department when they told me that my router was causing disconnections because I had too many USB devices connected. I wouldn't mind but the router's Ethernet...

Later in the same email came this gem:

Tiscali wrote: If you are using your Sky network, in the same phone sockets which are using to connect your Broadband telephone line, please use separate filters for each one of them.

Which could be taken a couple of ways but most people would take it as "use one filter for Sky, another one for your phones and use them on the same socket".

Switching over to a wireless router was easy and the connection speed is as I'd expect from Broadband...

Indeed, I am bemused at the amount of complaints on Tiscali's website forums because I haven't had any issues since I replaced Tiscali's crappy supplied modem and equally crappy filters with a router and filters off eBay. Okay, it's not 100% perfect but as we struggled to even get a 512k connection it's not going to be super-reliable. Better now than it was last summer though.