*** UPDATED ITEM AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS OP ***
~ Introduction ~
To start of with, I would like to make clear that this is not a comparison between BT and Telewest/Blueyonder, I aim purely to discuss the services provided by Telewest and the experiences that I have had since being one of ... Read review
3 brings together video calling, video clips, location based services and amazing content to browse and download. 3 has great offers and a huge range of the 3G handsets. Visit the 3 Shop to find more info. on offers
Advantages: Superb Internet Technology Disadvantages: Poor Customer Service
...discuss the services provided by Telewest and the experiences that I have had since being one of their customers.
As many of you will know Telewest Communications offer multi-channel TV, telephone and internet services primarily to home users but they do also cater for business users. They have also rapidly become BT's major competition in the telecommunications market. According to their website they currently provide services to ... .../>
I have been a Telewest customer since they first laid their cable infrastructure in my home county (Kent). I remember the initial reason being that my brother and myself wanted an internet connection each, so aswell as the normal telephone line this would involve having 3 telephones lines which we certainly could not afford with BT, so we opted for Telewest instead. We then over a period of time decided to sign-up for their other service - the ... more
*** UPDATED ITEM AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS OP ***
~ Introduction ~
To start of with, I would like to make clear that this is not a comparison between BT and Telewest/Blueyonder, I aim purely to discuss the services provided by Telewest and the experiences that I have had since being one of their customers.
As many of you will know Telewest Communications offer multi-channel TV, telephone and internet services primarily to home users but they do also cater for business users. They have also rapidly become BT's major competition in the telecommunications market. According to their website they currently provide services to 1.8 million UK households out of the 4.9 million homes that they are current able to service.
I have been a Telewest customer since they first laid their cable infrastructure in my home county (Kent). I remember the initial reason being that my brother and myself wanted an internet connection each, so aswell as the normal telephone line this would involve having 3 telephones lines which we certainly could not afford with BT, so we opted for Telewest instead. We then over a period of time decided to sign-up for their other service - the analogue cable TV service after ditching the sky service, not the modern sky package but the very old sky service when satellite dishes were often talked about as being an eye-sore, oh how public opinion has changed over the years - as I look out of my window there is barely a house that it is not adorned with one.
~ Telephone ~
The main incentive for having 3 Telewest telephone lines installed rather than BT was the fact that they offered half-price line rental on your first telephone line if you have 2 or more lines, so this was ideal for my brother and I to barter (more like beg, lol) with our parents.
So we signed up with Telewest about 7 years ago (1995) and for the first few months we paid at our local giro-bank because the olds didn't want all of the money coming directly out their account, this was a relatively quick and easy way of paying but the giro-bank then decided to charge a £1 fee for paying bills through them. So we were persuaded to start paying by Direct Debit (DD).
We filled out the DD form and posted it off so we were expecting the money to be taken out of the bank account at the end of the month, but instead we were presented with the same type of invoice to pay at the giro-bank, after a call to the customer services we were told that they had no record of our DD so we were sent another form which we completed and posted, another month goes by and we still get a giro-bank invoice and after another call to customer services they apologised and said that they will look into it, anyway to cut a long story short - this saga lasted for about four or five months until the DD was finalised.
A year went by with no problems at all, their customer base became larger in the area and more problems arose, this time our main telephone line appeared to be cut-off and after some scratching of the head we plumbed the telephone into one of our other lines, rang our number and some lady answers the phone, uhh... we discovered that the Telewest engineers had installed a telephone a few doors down the street from us and had actually wired the exchange box incorrectly, this took 2 days to correct.
After a couple of years with no problems, my brother moved out into his own place, we requested for his telephone line to be disconnected, so we had to wait the mandatory length of time (until the end of the month), which was fine and the line was disconnected, however we were still billed for some months after this and after "many" calls to customer services and a letter to the manager, the issue was resolved, all-be-it after we had threatened to cancel our subscription with them.
We have been with Telewest ever since and have not had any problems at all (touch wood), so well done Telewest for sorting yourselves out!
I will not bore you with the particulars of the call tariffs here but just in-case you are interested, I point you in the direction of the Telewest website http://www.telewest.co.uk, here you will find comprehensive information on both their 'Talk Unlimited' £25 a month and pay as you go tariffs.
~ TV ~
We decided to have the Cable TV package installed some 12 months after we got the telephone lines. At the time we had the old analogue Sky but Cable TV was much cheaper than Sky at the time and we also got a £2 a month discount because we were already subscribed to another Telewest service. It was also more attractive by removing the need to have an 'ugly' dish on the front of the house and it was packed with essentially most of the channels that we had on sky anyway apart from one or two channels.
We kept Cable TV until about 2 years ago when all of a sudden the digital TV era began, there were 3 candidates, i.) Sky Digital, ii) On Digital, iii) Active Digital (Telewest). We thought it was a good time switch to digital and decided on the third option (Active Digital) after seeing that other family members had digital TV already, admittedly none of them had Active Digital but it all looked rather exciting with all of these wonderful interactive features and a crystal clear picture!
We signed on the dotted line once more and we got our digital receiver the following week. I was watching the engineer tune the system in with awe willing him to hurry up so that I could get my hands on this space-aged looking remote control. The engineer only took about 10 minutes to install the system but it felt more like hours. I must have sat in front of the TV for about an hour surfing the channels and admiring the splendour of the picture quality. I then decided to look at the interactive features, i.e. e-mail, games, shopping.
The e-mail was good, a little difficult and long winded without a keyboard though, e-mails had to be written by using a virtual keyboard on the screen, using the arrow keys of the remote to traverse from key to key. The response time of the pages on the screen were very slow, it took ages to update the pages when scrolling through e-mails, but I guess that this is fairly common with most TV e-mail systems even by today’s standards. The games were actually quite good, there were quizzes, puzzles, and even a darts game and all were absolutely free to play. The shopping wasn't really my kind of thing, these were typically clothes and music shopping which you could purchase with your credit card through the TV. What was intriguing for me was that there was no phone line attached to the box unlike Sky; all information was sent and received through the coaxial RF (TV) cable.
All in all the TV was a fairly good package although I switched to Sky Digital about 12 months ago, primarily for the football but Sky do offer a lot more in terms of channel selections and interactive features. I will not digress though as this is best suited for a different op.
~ Internet ~
My brother and I originally signed up with 'Cable Internet' for £9.99 a month (not including call charges) which was reasonable 7 years ago and we found this to be a very reliable service almost always connecting at good speeds with our 56K modems. This dial-up service has gone through many upgrades (far too many to list here) but they now offer two dial-up tariffs, the 'Surf Unlimited' tariff which is £12 a month with no call charges, the pay as you go (PAYG) tariff is a FREE subscription with a call connection charge of 5p and 1.5p per minute thereafter. Both tariffs come bundled with FREE software, up to 15 e-mail addresses and 30MB personal web space. I am not able to comment on the reliability of this service nowadays as I have been with 'Blueyonder Broadband' for over a year now. More information can be obtained from the 'Blueyonder' website at http://www.blueyonder.co.uk.
The high-speed internet connection known as 'Blueyonder Broadband' (512K) claims to be up to 10 times faster than that of a 56K modem dial-up connection and I can certainly vouch for that, in fact I am currently downloading an MP3 file at the time of writing this and it is downloading at 65K a second without too much fluctuation and the speed is also noticeable when surfing the net. This service costs £25 a month if you currently subscribe to another Telewest service or £33 a month otherwise. You also get the same benefits of multiple e-mail addresses and personal web space.To be able to use the broadband service you will first need to have a Network Interface Card (NIC) which you can now pick-up for as little as £10 - The recommended minimum system requirements are as follows:
Windows 95/98/ME - P166MHZ with 32MB RAM or Windows 2000/NT - P200MHZ with 64MB RAM
125MB free hard-disk space
CD-ROM
NIC (10BaseT or 100BaseT)
Unlike the traditional modem, you are provided with a 'Cable Modem', so basically you do not use a telephone line to connect to the internet - you are connected to the internet 24 hours a day and 7 days a week without any additional charge. This is made possible by using a standard coaxial RF cable, the same type that is used for digital TV and these are all provided by Blueyonder at the time of installation.More recently Blueyonder have introduced an even faster 'Blueyonder Broadband' service (1MB), which is twice as fast as the 512K broadband, therefore roughly 20 times faster than 56K dial-up and I am seriously considering upgrading, however the cost is increased to £35 a month to existing customers of broadband or £40 a month to new customers.
~ Summary ~
My family have been customers with Telewest for over 7 years and have had a few problems with their level of customer of service, however we stuck with them, they have improved and offer some good services, so my recommendations would be as follows:
I would not recommend their TV package 5/10 I would recommend their Telephone package 7/10 I would highly recommend their Internet package 10/10
Ciao for now .. Wolfie
* UPDATE *
Have now upgraded to their Broadband (1MB) service which was surprisingly quick and easy (for existing customers) - I went to the Blueyonder Broadband home page located at 'http://www.blueyonder.co.uk and clicked on the item that says "New 1MB service - Click Here" from which you need to log-on with your username and password, after reading some brief information on the new service, i accepted their terms and conditions and 24 hours later all I had to do was to disconnect my cable modem (turn off power from the wall) for 2 minutes and voila, i am now enjoying much faster download speeds (have noticed a download at 104K a second so far).
New customers will get the option of either 512K or 1MB service at the time of applying.
Definately worth the upgrade if you are keen on your big downloads.
Advantages: Cost, free calls, customer services, different packages (all of which are good) to choose from Disadvantages: None so far!
...Simeon, a door to door Telewest canvasser. Now, these people who knock the door to sell me stuff usually get a mouthful off me but Simeon was invited in for a cup of tea while he gave me his spiel. And it sounded good. Basically, for a one off installation fee of £30 (usually £50) we could get connected to Telewest phone, TV and Blueyonder broadband internet. For this op, however, I'm going to concentrate on my phone service.
After much consideration ... ...any call charges to our Telewest bill. I signed the contract there and then and was given a copy plus a cancellation document in case I changed my mind. Simeon arranged for our phone to be installed 3 days later with a minimum of fuss and we were able to keep our old phone number. Bonus! We were also given the option of having a second phone line installed for £10 a month but as I'm the only one who uses the phone in this house it wouldn't have been ...
Fruity_Tart 30.04.2003
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Telewest
Advantages: great high speed internet Disadvantages: completely pants customer service
...service you have received from Telewest YOU ARE DEAD RIGHT! For those of you who don’t know, Telewest Broadband (as it is now known) is a provider of Digital TV, telephone & internet. I have worked for them for very nearly 6 years (yes, that is 6 YEARS!) so I think I am in a pretty good position to pass comment, on what was once a good company to work for, but more importantly for you the consumer, a company that you are happy to do business ... ...you, the consumer, have with Telewest as a company fall into two main categories, Customer Service and Fault Repair. These are the two I’m going to discuss, having worked in both departments, as the majority of issues customers have seem to create themselves from these two categories.
CUSTOMER SERVICE/BILLING
Where do you start? To be blunt, it is a shambles. How many of you faithful subscribers out there have had to sit and wait in a queue ...
paulc20001 04.07.2002
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Telewest
Advantages: Cheaper than BT, good customer service, excellent choice of tarriffs, flexibilty, good range of advanced add-ons. Disadvantages: You are surcharged for not paying by Direct Debit (!), occasion boo-boo by customer service, clarity of line not as good as BT (but see review) Mobile option doesn't include Three.
...wife relented and when the Telewest rep called, I signed up for Telewest and had BT disconnected. Telewest were running a free connection promotion so I saved £35 over BT straight away.
The installation work was simple enough-involved running a line from the street into the house, installing a box and getting it all running. This took about a couple of hours and the installation went very well-no mess and minimum of disruption.
On connecting the ... ...My first bill with Telewest was £14.95 in comparison to the over £25 I used to pay with BT using the forerunner of their 3-2-1 tarriff. A great bonus was the free calls after 8pm to other Telewest numbers which contributed to to that reduction.
I've moved twice since then, both times Telewest have installed new services such as my Internet connection (Blueyonder which is also excellent), and Digital cable TV. On each occasion, the installation has ...
peterkinxl5 30.03.2005
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Telewest
Advantages: Fast-reliable internet, digital quality TV, not overly expensive Disadvantages: The TV locks up, few interactive options, available in certain areas only
Telewest Broadband.
Internet Connections:
Dial-up: 56kb (£13/mth + £10/mth phone line)
Cable: 512kb (£29.99/mth); 1MB (£39.99/mth); 2MB (£54.99/mth). You get £5 off if you get a phone line
Phone Line: £10/mth
Digital TV:
Starter Package, 30 channels (free); Essential Package, 60 channels (£18.50/mth, incl. phone line); Supreme Package, 100 channels (£25.50/mth, incl. phone line). You can also purchase other packages such as Sky Sports, Sky ... ...up, it's quite efficient.
Telewest broadband has, as of yet, failed to give me any such concerns. When you look at broadband providers over the UK, you've got BT, NTL and Blueyonder (Telewest) as your big three. BT connect using DSL, which still runs through the phoneline, and has certain limitations to download speeds. NTL and Blueyonder share the cable internet side of things, but unfortunately, you rarely get the choice between the two, because ...
jeylee 06.11.2003
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Telewest
Advantages: Paying less for my telephone calls Disadvantages: Having to change my ISP
...I received a flyer from Telewest advertising their telephone service at £25 per month and it prompted me to do a bit of research. It looked as though it would save me some money and you know what I’m like when there’s a good deal involved!
You see - since I have stopped full time working I tend to ring my mom during the day for a bit of a chat. Well, if you’re anything like me, the words ‘telephone call’, ‘mom’ ... ...all the information about the Telewest telephone service and realised that for the £25 per month I would get the following:-
Unlimited local and national telephone calls – excluding calls to mobile numbers, Internet connections and international calls.
A Smartbox fitted to the television through which we would be able to receive digital TV including the five terrestrial channels, plus 12 further core channels such as News 24, BBC Choice, ...
SusanLesley 14.11.2001
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Telewest
I switched briefly from BT to cable (Telewest) a couple of years back and only lasted a few months. The service was down on more than a few occasions, and that is something I have never had with BT. Sure, some of the other companies may be cheaper, but you only get what you pay for. If you want a good reliable service then BT fits the bill entirely. It is worth paying a bit extra to make sure that the service is there when you need it. BT will still be about long after many of the others have gone - so why put up with the hassle of changing? ...
Lad 23.07.2000
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of BT
When i first got my orange just talk phone over one year ago i couldnt fault orange in any way calls were cheapest for my useage it was very easy to set up on the network and could always get good reception. Text messages arrived within minutes of them being sent. Vouchers were easy to buy. Now 1 year later all i get is network busy or this service is temporarily unavailable it once took a week of trying to retrieve voice mail messages i was waiting to find out about a job at the time. When trying to ring orange customer services guess what this service is temporarily unavailable. Orange was so good but i believe by mis managment that they have to many customers for there network to handle similar to the problems telewest had with surf unlimited. Orange sort your self out!! ...
richardjmeek 27.12.2000
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful Review of Orange
Advantages: Teaches you how to speak to three year olds Disadvantages: Bloody Terrible
apologies or explanations, just an 'Oh, you should have contacted the engineers yourself.' Ahh. And how do we do that? By phoning 150, of course.
Of course. Well, not of course actually. Problem? Our phone line is cable, and 150 takes us through to telewest engineers, not BT. Hmmmmmm. This problem was remedied and a date set for the engineers to call - Monday 12th March. Between 10:30 and 1pm.
Bless Ama, he made sure all the bits of wire etc were easily accessible. He cleared the bedroom of pairs of pants and dead animal debris (courtesy of the cats, not us!) and he waited. And he waited. And he waited some more.
No sign of BT. No phone call to offer an explanation.
Result? Well, AOL will have our custom for at least another month until telewest can install their surftime equivalent for us. One thing is for certain ...
Medusa 13.03.2001
· Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of BT