Posted: 29th Feb, 2008 By: MarkJ
Complaints about ISP Tiscali UK are nothing new, although over the past couple of weeks there has been a significant increase. Todays update has pushed the providers total past the 100 complaints mark to 119 (since the start of this year) - '
ISP Complaints' page.
We had hoped that the drop-off in complaints towards the end of last year might have signalled an improvement but that does not appear to have materialised. Instead customers are still being plague by the same old performance, connectivity, billing and support problems. Several samples of this weeks complaints have been pasted below:
Terrible customer service and I have now been totally without any internet connection since 11th February thats 17 days. And that despite 3 messages posted on their online contact service, a call to their technical helpline (at 10p a minute for 9 minutes) and a letter to their complaints department.
They have not attempted to get in touch with me once.
By - David
I opted for a Tiscali Broadband and talk bundle with reduced line rental in January and was told that the transfer of my phone service would be seamless and without disruption. For the last week I have been unable make or receive phone calls.
Tiscali Billing and Care told me it was a technical problem and I should ring Tiscali talk (- hardly helpful, particularly as I don't use a mobile) - so I replied asking them to take action and inform me by return what was happening - No reply. I have emailed Tiscali complaints - no acknowledgement. I have sent two letters to their CEO (one registered, which was signed for on 21st. Feb) - no response.
By - Stephen
Very poor connection - while they claim they don't limit ports, and will only limit heavy users, I've noticed nothing but problems from the day I signed up. Examples include: inability to connect to Hamachi during certain hours, inability to use 4oD (four on demand) during certain hours, very slow connection speeds during peak hours.
I've never received an email to say my connection will be limited during peak hours, yet from around 6PM until after midnight, there are numerous problems like the above with other services too. (BitTorrent, Usenet, slow downloads from web surfing).
Never had a single issue like this on
Nildram, all these problems started the day I started using Tiscali.
By - ChrisI moved my BT line to Tiscali Talk with an activation date of Feb 15. My phone has been cut off since that date.
I have made numerous phone calls to their customer service dept on their premium rate line from my mobile phone
very costly. I continued to call them on a daily basis since Feb 15. There is virtually no customer support from Tiscali nor is there ever any follow up. Forget about e-mailing them as you only get an automated response with some ridiculous suggestions or are informed that the problem is resolved.
Where are our Consumer rights on this?
By - Alex
We noticed that some of the complaints appeared to show a pattern of connectivity problems, which may or may not be to do with Tiscali's seemingly endless platform migrations. There was also an outage at the West Wickham exchange during the week, although that only applies to a tiny fraction of the complaints, many of which appear to be long-running concerns.