Tiscali- Broadband

Author's product rating:   

Quality of site content	Satisfactory
Technical support quality	Very Poor
Ease of installation	Easy
Range of services (e.g. web-space, email)	Satisfactory
Access & availability of service	Poor
Value for money	Poor

Advantages:	Whe it works it's OK .   Fairly cheap deals .
Disadvantages:	When it doesn't work, you might as well talk to the wall .  Slow and unreliable .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Tiscali is a company that makes a mockery of the term "Internet Service Provider" as they fall down pretty much on all three counts. It's been my misfortune to have paid these people my hard earned cash for the past few months, but let's start from the beginning:

Tiscali is an Italian owned company that has been providing it's ISP services since 1998 and has bought out many smaller ISPs across Europe, it now provides services to 11 EU countries. They have the slogan "Internet with a Passion".

I signed up to Tiscali in late 2003 afer moving house, my old ISP which was NTL couldn't provide me with their cable service to my new house. I started paying Tiscali £24.99 amonth for their dial-up service at 56k, remember the good old days?

Initially things went well, the free modem they provided was reliable, the software easy to install etc. I had the odd few disconnections during my time with their dialup service which is to be expected, at least compared to the service I had previously experienced from other providers.

In the middle of 2004 I upgraded to Tiscali's Broadband service at 1Mb, the cost was the same as I had been paying for the dial-up service.

Initially again I had no problems with the new service, although I wasn't getting anything like the full 1Mb speed, more like about half that, but it was a big improvement over dialup so I was satisfied.

However, things started to go wrong during the early part of 2006 as I started to get disconnections if I was online for more than about 2 hours. Usually this wasn't a big problem as the modem would automatically reconnect almost immediately, but it was a real pain when it happened during a race.

You see I am in an online racing league, every week I take part in an online race using the game Nascar Racing 2003 and the races take place against 20 or 30 other drivers, usually these races take about 2 hours to complete. I had several races ruined by being disconnected half way through, it's extremely frustrating when you've spend a lot of time practising a track and working on the cars setup only for everything to be wasted when you get disconnected and are then classed as last place. I even had a few disconnections when I had been leading races, which is even worse.

I was just about to change ISP when I got a phone call out of the blue from Tiscali offering me a reduction in my monthly direct debit to £18.99 a month and an increase in speed to 2Mb and also free phone calls. I had realised that by now I was paying over the odds for the 1Mb service I had and so agree to this change (who wouldn't?) and hoped that the reliability of the service would also improve.

This was around summer 2006 and at first things did improve, although I didn't really notice much speed improvement, it certainly wasn't 2Mb when I did the various on-line tests to check the speed of the connection, maybe half that on a good day.

I received a letter from Tiscali in late 2006, around September or October, which said they were doing some maintenance to improve their service and I might find I couldn't connect for a couple of hours during this work.

Fair enough I thought, sounds good, but this is when things went seriously downhill.

At first I thought the problem was at my end as I couldn't connect to the internet using my laptop, which runs off a wireless router. If I tried connecting through my desktop using the Tiscali modem it worked OK. However, I soon realised that this was an intermittant problem so I decided to ring Tiscali's helpline which is an 0870 number, so it cost me about 8p a minute.

I rang them up and soon discovered that their call centre is in India, the first person I spoke to couldn't understand my accent and couldn't get my details up as they couldn't understand my postcode.

My accent isn't strong, I've worked in a well known banks internet banking helpdesk and spoken to thousands of people without any similar issues.

I rang the same number back and got someone else who could understand me. They went through various checks of my router and confirmed that the settings were correct. They advised me to call back again if the problem hadn't resolved itself in the next 48 hours, as if it was magically going to go away.

By the time I rang back things were worse I now couldn't connect using my desktop PC and the Tiscali modem and so a different set of solutions were tried, which included creating a new icon for me to connect with on my desktop.

Once again the problem wasn't resolved during the phone call and I was now getting a "797 error", or similar, I can't remember the exact number. I now knew the problem was definitely at Tiscali's end as I checked the error code on my PC at work and I had also now been unable to connect on either of my home PCs, using either my Tiscali modem or my Router, so I knew the problem had to be with them.

I rang back once again and went through the same old solutions once again, I told the person on the phone I'd done this already but it was obvious that they were reading from a script. I asked to speak to a team leader/manager and was told that there wasn't one. I was slightly surprised at the fact that the call centre didn't have anyone in charge, although maybe I shouldn't have been. I pressed further and was told that the manager was on another phone call, so I asked if he could call me back when he'd finished.

I was then left on hold for a few minutes and then told that the manager would call me back.......within 48 hours.

I was now so annoyed that I cancelled my direct debit with Tiscali and vowed to change straight away to another ISP.

I signed up for BT the next day, but couldn't complete the application as I needed a "MAC" (Migrate away customer) number, I asked Tiscali if I could have one but they told me some mumbo jumbo about me being on LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) and therefore they couldn't give me a MAC number.

In desperation I tried using the Tiscali online help forums, and finally I started to get somewhere! The person on the forum who dealt with me was very helpful, and I could connect again within a couple of days, in total I'd been offline for 11 days and had made around 6 phone calls to the Tiscali "help"line, totalling around 2 hours.

A few days later I got a different error when I tried connecting and a phone number to call, when I called the number I was told that they'd disconnected me as I'd cancelled my direct debit. I thought this was a little cheeky as the direct debit payment wasn't due for another 2 weeks and I had asked my bank to reinstate it, I advised the person on the phone about this and they said no problem, they would reconnect me within 2 hours.

Finally I wrote a letter of complaint to Tiscali about the issues I'd had and asked for compensation of £50 to cover my trouble, cost of phone calls and the fact I was offline for nearly two weeks.

I thought this was reasonable but they wrote back advising me that they would only offer me £20 credit to my account, in other words a "free" month of their high quality service. Apparantly they don't reimburse the cost of phone calls when you ring their helpdesk, even if the problem is at their end. That is around £10 I've lost plus my time.

I also contacted Tiscali by email several times during the problems and one annoying thing that they do is automatically assume the problem is resolved if you don't respond to them within 48 hours of giving you a "solution". This is highly unacceptable if you are having problems connecting to the internet, how can you respond to them? I had to use friends computers to email them and could only get access to them occasionally.

Since these problems were resolved the service I've recevied from Tiscali has been acceptable, but I do still get disconnected every now and then so I've had more of my online races ruined. I will be changing ISP as soon as I get my "free" month, which I am still waiting for - I've queried this on their forum and been given another 0870 number to ring.

Overall I can't recommend Tiscali, which is probably unsurprising, but if you are with them and have problems then I would suggest you use their forums for technical support if you can get access to them.

I realise that other ISPs come in for flak but in my experience they do resolve problems usually on the first telephone call, not Tiscali.

Just to close, I'll state that I pay £18.99 a month for alleged 2Mb boadband, I got a free modem with that and signed up to a 12 month contract initially. I get unlimited downloads included in that deal, but beware as they do limit people who they consider "download excessively". I also get 50Mb free webspace with the account although trying to get my FTP password reset was so difficult I gave up in the end.

Not much point me listing Tiscali's current deals as they are likely to change often.

If you do want to sign up with them (are you mad?) then I recommend you do so via www.quidco.com as you can get cash-back, in fact a lot of ISPs offer this so check it out if you are looking for a new ISP.

Updated 19th September

I just recevied a letter from a debt collection agency due to these jokers. I cancelled my contract with them in April and went to BT, but they've still been charging me for a service I've not received. I rang them back in June as I was getting bills and they told me it would be sorted out. I've had no more bills and then this drops through the letterbox, nice!

I rang them again tonight and they are going to sort it out, allegedly.

Final Update (I hope) 11th April 2008

Well, unsurprisingly I got another letter from the debt collection company threatening me with legal action and an increase of the outstanding balance, which was around £40.

Having no faith in Tiscali I paid this to get them off my back, £40 for nothing, not good.

To Tiscali's credit (finally) they did reimburse me this amount after I wrote a long letter explaining everything that had happened, but it did take about a month.