Every once in awhile we do a news item summarising some of the ISP problems our readers have been complaining about over the past week (
Complaints page). This week has seen Tiscali and Fast4 receive the lion’s share of consumer frustration, with
Pipex getting a small mention too.
For Tiscali it's been the now common place mix of connection problems, an inability to get anything resolved via customer support, slow speeds and the occasional billing error. Two examples of this week’s complaints’ can be found below:
My broadband connection fails to work from 18.00hrs to gone midnight every night apart from the odd night, for about the last three months.When you phone them up they are useless. Not only that they charge you for the phone calls. They are rubbish and don`t recommend them to anyone.
By : Tim
Tiscali broadband was barely acceptable for 1st few months with frequent disconnections and slow speeds. Despite repeated telephone calls (usually to Indian call centres) all I received were referrals to on-line help, various promises, excuses and pleas for patience whilst known problems were addressed. They were not and the "service" declined further until I had no connection whatsoever between 1700 and 2300 every day and much longer at weekends. Nothing I could say or do would invoke any sort of actual response.
By : Derek
In particular we've noted a lot of complaints where customers have recently switched their land-line to Tiscali only to find that it stops working. Some users have complained of being without a voice line for nearly three weeks!
Orange had similar problems following the introduction of its land-line and broadband (
LLU) bundle.
Typically we'd like to remind Tiscali users that we can only forward your complaint on to a higher level if you give us clear permission to do so at the top of your e-mail, including a username alongside.
However Tiscali hasn't been the only ISP running into problems, its recently acquired off-spring,
Pipex, has had a few customer support issues of its own. Then there's Fast4, which had been getting better following a period of instability and now appears to be taking a turn for the worse again.
Seven Fast4 customers have reported numerous problems, from the now familiar high latency issues to connection problems, slow speeds and a lack of constructive feedback from customer support. Two example complaints have been pasted below:
Every evening pings skyrocket to 300-2000 then I get disconnected either completely from 2-8 hours, or multiple times over said period.
60p /min tech support calls, when the issue is 100% their fault, and even then they say they do not do anything which helps.
By : Tim
Basically I have been with Fast4 since the **/05/2007, the first 3 weeks of there service was great but since then I have had nothing but trouble, slow speeds extremely high latency.
Since I have been with Fast4 I have had about total of 5 weeks good internet. But a majority of the time it has been like I have a dialup connection. I have had 2 BT Engineers around and they have found no faults, I have also replaced much of my equipment. This has cost me a lot of money, it was not until I found this site that I realised I was not the only person with the problems.
By : Clare
We note from customers that Fast4 last updated their service status page on 26th September 2007 to confirm that issues with ADSL connections were under investigation, yet appeared to have no idea where they were coming from and couldn't "
ascertain if there is an issue present".
Judging by this week’s raft of complaints we'd say that there is clearly a problem, though no further updates have been issued to this affect on their page since Wednesday. Fast4 is supplied by EurISP.