Before Christmas, Karl and I were having problems with our ISP, Tiscali. This was the first time in 3-4 years only the second time in 3-4 years that we’d had problems, despite lots of other users giving bad reviews/etc. We used them when we lived them at Karl’s mum’s and have used them since we moved in here at the flat (which as I mentioned recently, was nearly 18 months ago).
The problem was basically port blocking. Between the hours of about 7pm and 9pm neither Karl nor myself could access e-mail (neither SMTP/POP worked) or FTP. This was not local to use, other Tiscali users were experiencing the same problem, even the headteacher of the school that Karl works for.
Some time down the line the problem went away. We rejoiced, and I continued to develop my websites without having to upload a file at a time through the stupid-ass control panel system. Cue 2008, and the problem is back.. except it’s not restricted to 2 hourly periods, we’re now experiencing mass mail/FTP downtime from any point between 5pm and 10:30pm. That’s 5 and a half hours, and fuck knows it could be down before I get home from work (I finish at 5.)
Karl has been updated a thread at the Tiscali support forum to reflect our recent problem, but Tiscali have been generally ignoring it. Pages of complaints are being created each day so he’s having to go back and bump it, but this isn’t a problem because it means he can log each lot of downtime. Anyway, Karl updated yesterday pointing out that as we’re both in IT we use our connection to do remote maintenance, work from home and/or update our relevant websites. Tiscali then have the cheek to come back today and say:
I will say, the usage you are describing is business usage and this is a consumer service. I highly recomend you regrade your package to one of the business services.
What.. the fuck? Since when is a basic requirement such as FTP or e-mail a business requirement? Since when is wanting to update my non-profit, non-business website a requirement for a business service?! I don’t do online gaming, I don’t do file sharing or mass downloading.. in fact, I probably use less than 1Gb a month in bandwidth and they expect me to pay over the odds for a business service?! Quite frankly, I’ve used their business service before and it SUCKED.
Safe to say I am very pissed off. We’re paying for a service that we can’t use because the majority of it is failing during the only times we’re at home. I can’t update the quilting bee site or download the mail, I can’t update files on my own site and I can’t do any work from home that I might want to get finished.
We’re out of our pre-defined contract length, so if Tiscali don’t stop pushing their luck we’ll be out of there quicker than you can say “useless bloody ISP”.
16 Jan at 9:43 pm
Ah Tiscali. My colleague at work has to rely on his mobile phone for internet access because his “8mb broadband” is slower than 56k most of the time and non existent the rest of the time. Complete and utter stupidity.
16 Jan at 9:45 pm
*hugs* ISP problems are bad, and, unfortunately, I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Tiscali… Who are you thinking of switching to? We’re with BT and haven’t had a problem so far (touch wood).
16 Jan at 9:52 pm
Virgin Media is equally as bad, if not worse. :(
16 Jan at 10:08 pm
Oh my, I am so sorry Jem. I feel for you. I know what it feels like to be without your ISP. It completely sucks. I go completely insane every time my ISP goes down. Can you change? I would if you could. There is no reason for you to have a business account just for blogs. That is just stupid. I really would change ISPs if you can.
16 Jan at 10:10 pm
^ Virgin Media have cleared up their act a lot though… If you think it’s bad now, you should hear what it was like in the beginnings of broadband (back when it was NTL) and the max speed you could get was 1mb. My parents got said broadband package since it was one of the only ones out at the time. No end of problems. Unexplained downtime (lasting days rather than hours), no apologies, not even any sign that they’d even noticed. “Service status: No problems” Yeah, right. Fast forward 5-6 years and they’ve had a couple of days’ continuous downtime (again, unexplained, unnoticed, no apology) in about a year. That’s not as good as my ISP (BT) but a lot better than it was. I have to say, even though BT are not one of the cheaper ISPs (and they have caps on the bandwidth, grrr), I’ve been using their services for almost 3 years and I think we had half an hour’s downtime (with due notice) in all that time. No problems with speed or anything. We get our 8mb and we’re happy with it. :)
16 Jan at 10:15 pm
That sucks, the cheek of them to suggest you should pay more money for a business account you do not need. I use BT and they’re excellent, despite what people say. They may not be the cheapest, but I’ve not had a problem with them and I’ve been with them almost two years.
16 Jan at 10:32 pm
I’ll be honest, I’ve been on Tesco.net for about 5 years and they’ve been nothing short of fantastic. No complaints, even if it’s not the fastest (We’re on 512kb connection). However, it’s enough for what I use :)
16 Jan at 10:39 pm
Ah ISP problems… that takes me back. It was my third year in university, the only year I lived out of halls and we had ntl, a student deal for £9.99 a month. Seems ok, in fact the service wasn’t bad. Until one weekend where it disappeared. Gone, completely. Many a phone call to customer service and tech support were fruitless, until finally it turned out that we had two accounts. One which we were paying for and the other which was supplying our broadband. Since we hadn’t been paying for the second one, they cut it off, also rendering our modem useless (somehow). It took nearly a week of phone calls and eventually an engineer visit before we were back online. Tiscali blocking ports is just weird though, how can that even help them? Surely email and FTP don’t eat through their bandwidth! I hope you get that sorted soon, complain as high as you possibly can, you get more attention that way. As for me, now I’m on “You can’t complain because you don’t pay for it” Talk Talk Broadband. Of course I don’t complain, you know why? I haven’t had any problems. I don’t think you can guarantee any ISP is any good, it’s just a matter of luck :D
16 Jan at 10:44 pm
Ugh, gotta love ISP issues– I’m sure word of Comcast (my crap-ass ISP) and their BitTorrent port blocking has been heard of over there, and on top of that, they laid bad cable in my neighborhood, so our internet, tv, and phone all go down multiple times a day, and their only response? “Oh, we’re working on laying new fiber, it’ll be done in the next couple of months or so.” They’ve been saying that for the past two years though… At least you guys over there in the UK have more ISP options than we do– here where I live, it’s either Comcast, Qwest (which also screwed us over way back when), or dialup, unless you wanna shell out a buttload of money for that mobile broadband crap that has data caps and is restricted out the ass…
16 Jan at 10:55 pm
That’s why my parents call them ‘Tiscrapi.’ There was a load of cafuffule with them after they were bought out by line-one, I think that they were miffed about some cheaper packages some of the users were on, and the users were basically moaning about their servers seemingly being held together by string and tape. My Mum was in on it all, I’ll have to ask her all aboot it. That was about 10 years ago, obviously customer services haven’t improved much since then.
16 Jan at 11:06 pm
I use the Phonecoop and have found them reliable and friendly! They’re fairly small and you can get to speak to the same chap most often when you need to, which isn’t often. They don’t block any ports or throttle them, in fact I run a server on my connection and use BitTorrent to distribute my DVD and that runs most of the time, with no problem. They are also of course a cooperative which I believe to be the way to go generally :-)
17 Jan at 12:16 am
I guess I’m lucky that the only problems we had with our ISP was the idiot they sent over to install it didn’t do it properly. We had no internet for two weeks, but that’s because my idiot parents took their sweet time in calling the company up. They figured it would simply work itself out… guess not.
17 Jan at 12:41 am
ROFL, what ever you do don’t go for that BT Broadband and phone thign. The phone is the cheapest nastiest thing i have seen in a long seen and also it don’t work no more. We asked for a new one the sent us another ruter and no phone >:(
17 Jan at 1:48 am
You: “We’re having problems using FTP.” Them: “Why don’t you pay more for a different program even though this one is not working!?”
17 Jan at 5:53 am
I have the BT broadband with the phone hub and it’s really fast. We’ve been with BT internet for about 7 years now. Moved over to broadband 2 years ago and then Recently upgraded to the Bt broadband with wireless and phone hub. The indisn guys on the other end of the line are always helpful.
17 Jan at 6:21 am
People don’t get that there are personal websites. The vast majority thinks that if it’s not for profit, there’s no use for it. *shrugs* The “work from home” part must have thrown them off.
17 Jan at 9:42 am
I’m having the exact same problems with Tiscali, but whenever I speak to one of their drones on the helpline they always deny there is a problem. Sadly, we’re stuck in a contract for the next six months, but things are so bad I’m considering jumping ship anyway. I’m already paying them for services they’re not providing so what would be the difference? Come back BT Broadband, all is forgiven…
17 Jan at 10:01 am
“useless bloody ISP”! :p I would be so pissed too if I were you. I can’t believe the response they gave you! I mean, having a website is no longer something only businesses have, and them having problems like this hurts so many people and their websites. I hope things work out soon, or that you maybe change providers.
17 Jan at 9:04 pm
You only just noticed? Tiscali are the worst ISP in the existence of the world ever. Seriously, Tiscali are /really/ bad (the worst) when it comes to portblocking – I’ve been dis-recommending them for over a year. Since I used to play MMOs, I noticed it a lot. No voice comms, no games during peak hours (the hours I just so happened to play, being a uni student) – and they still denied portblocking at all and claimed to have fixed it a million times and yet it was still shit. I recommend switching from them immediately, there’s not many ISPs available in my area but if you can BE is pretty good afaik and I’m with BT atm (no BE in my area) which I’ve actually had no trouble with so far. It’s not as cheap, but it’s better value for money ;) Plusnet I used to recommend as an ISP but I switched from them at home recently (I only used Tiscali at uni) because it seems they got bought out or something and their service is dismal at best – they used to be genuinely interested in their customers, but no longer. I also highly dis-recommend Orange (previously Wanadoo previously Freeserve).
17 Jan at 9:07 pm
I am with Tiscali also and having the same problems, except that after complaining on the forum i suddenly can’t log on to it any more ( I wasnt rude). I phoned Tiscali yesterday and was told a tech person would phone me within 24 hours, and i have had no phone call. I also emailed them and they claim to reply to your email within one working day, guess what no reply there either. Tiscali are very good at ignoring paying customers. I have been seriously thinking of going to Virgin but dont know much about them, i dont want to go from the frying pan to the fire.
17 Jan at 9:07 pm
Actually, I remember an incident four years ago where the company I worked for were using Tiscali and something wasn’t working properly and the customer service were awful. Tiscali really is a simple case of ‘you get what you pay for’ – cheap crap.
17 Jan at 11:52 pm
…what utter crap. BUSINESS service to use email and FTP? Where do they get off saying that? It makes me wonder if they put trained monkeys or untrained morons on the phones at some of these places. I though it was bad that US cable giant Comcast’s been blocking Bittorrent communications. At least they’ve never proved their incompetence by saying that FTP was a “business” service.
19 Jan at 12:26 pm
DON’T go with tiscali & PC World will tell you the same thing ! – very bad customer services,support staff that have’nt got a clue what their talking about,and if your trying to play online games – FORGET IT coz they’ll block you from connecting to the sever anywhere from 11:30am till 12:30am weekends and from 13:00 till 12:00am weekdays – keeping in mind that their so called ‘fair user policy ‘ is from 12:00 till 16:00 weekends and from 18:00 till 23:00 weekdays !!!!! Pure GARBAGE,Do NOT waste your money.
21 Jan at 5:03 pm
I’m sure you’ve had a zillion links to this by now, but: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/tiscali_itunes_blocked/
22 Jan at 2:21 pm
I changed from Telewest to Sky Broadband because they have equipment in my exchange and can give me 12mbit broadband (that connects at 12mbit) uncapped for £10pm. Unfortunately, the Ironbridge exchange doesn’t have any LLU operators so you’re stuck with BT and a service provider until Q4 2011 when they expect to enable 21CN. If you want to ditch BT you’re going to have to move to an area covered by Dawley, Donnington, Oakengates, Stirchley or Wellington exchanges.
26 Jan at 6:30 am
I’m with Tiscali too, have been for over 6months now and I’ve not had a problem with them, bar the one time it was down, but only for a hour or so. I download alot, online game more, and never once have I been told about exceeding the fair use policy. Was previously with BT, they were terrible in my opinion, and I get better speeds from a 2mb line than I did with my BTs supposedly 6mb,
27 Jan at 7:08 pm
Tiscali are absolutely terrible, I use them and DNS constantly goes down (using OpenDNS now), speeds are about a quarter of what they should be, the service is rubbish. We’ve moving to BT.
28 Jan at 9:18 am
I too am a long suffering Tiscali user, my phone and internet went down in November, when some one took the phone lines, tyring to get the thick ignorant tossers in the help center to get intouch with BT to enquire about the problem is like getting blood out of a stone. My phone rings out ok but people have problems rining in, and trying to log onto the the internet is just a joke. It either works and then stops or just does not log in. I agree with an eralier comment I read, the problem appears to be with their server not working. Any ideas, as I an getting fed up with their help desk, as someone has already stated, learn the langauge, I have even threatend to leave having phoned the cancel conection line only to be told “fine, we can disconect you now, if you like” not the response I wanted. I also aske for my MAC code only to be told I could not have it as I have a phone and internet combined service. What CRAP! Thinking of going back to BT for phone line and UKOnline for ISP, at least their help desk is in the UK.
06 Feb at 10:20 pm
yep Tiscali suck. Port blocking, speed throttling, packet shapeing bla! (am currently downloading at 53kps from microsoft.com over HTTP btw) Have been with them nearly a year now. Thank god my minimum contract is nearly up. will soon be off to greener pastures!! oh and Clive H, I do believe that they have to supply you with your MAC by Law within 5 days of asking. I even think if you speak nicely to BT sales they will handle all the migration for you (they will get your MAC from them). Will probably cost a few bob though ;)
21 Feb at 1:20 pm
come on…. bad experiences are to be had from all suppliers! lets not start with talktalk!
25 Mar at 8:11 pm
I paid Tiscali (now TalkTalk) in full for my phone and broadband then left a forwarding address and telephone number in case of any issues. One and a half years later I get a text message from a debt collection agency demanding £17.
I call Tiscali and paid them, but I wanted to complain that they took this route instead of writing or calling me direct. I asked to speak to a manager, but no that’s not allowed. They have a 72 hour backlog of complaints! I ask for a name of a manager, no, no names. How do I complain? I have to write! I can’t email or phone. What a terrible customer services idea. You can do anything you want as long as you don’t complain!!
Avoid Tiscali and TalkTalk, they are the worst company I have ever dealt with and very unprofessional.