Tiscali

I've come through Freedom to Surf, bought out by Pipex, then bought out by Tiscali, part of carphone warehouse, whatever they are this week.
I've had a few months of useless connection speeds, and finally got round to testing to make sure it wasn't my pc/router/internal lines.
I spent a full day on and off the phone trying to convince support that my 8Mb service should really be getting more than 375kbps throughput, despite connecting at 6.2Mbps, including installing a different router, different PC's, etc etc. Various support staff and a full day later having provided them with 5 speed tests at 3 hour intervals, I finally rang back as directed to escalate to BT.
At this point I was told it was probably a BT problem, and they COULD escalate, but it's unlikely BT would be able to do anything about it.
I've shortened this summary obviously, but the support is as bad as I can imagine, and the speed as you can see is lingering in the 1990's.
I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. Just initiated my move to plusnet, so we'll see how they get on.

We've been with Tiscali for 12 months due to their cheap £15 a month tarriff for 8mbps broadband, but the service has been a joke from start to finish. It's only really useable between 10am-3pm on weekdays and outside this range the speed of the connection drops to ridiculous levels. It was virtually impossible to use Spotify in the evenings and weekends, with frequent 30+ second drops in the audio as it attempted to buffer enough of the stream to play again.

At one point in April/May they also put some ridiculous traffic shaping scheme in place for Steam, meaning I couldn't even log into my account for around 3 weeks (tiscali denies this ever happened, but there are numerous accounts of it on the steam forums). P2P applications are indiscriminately filtered to the point of being useless, a gross oversight given how much legitimate content is distributed over bittorrent these days.

In short, avoid Tiscali at all costs. Don't be lured by their low price packages, they are an abysmal ISP and will also force you into a long, drawn-out argument when you attempt to cancel the service. They claimed we had a poor quality phone line, but we are less than 100m from the exchange and OrbMT shows a very clean profile for the line (8124kbps down, 10db SNRM, 5db line attenuation). As far as I can tell, they are to blame, and I can't wait to be shot of them.

Tiscali are no good! I requested 12 month contract and they signed me up to a 24 month. Made 4 calls, but still not sorted even after tiscali admitted to their mistake.

It is over 2 weeks since my line was supposed to be 'activated' yet i still cant make a call and get any broadband signal at all.

Very poor customer service, the advisors do not know what they are doing and the call centres are based in India. It will take you at least 15 minutes before you get to speak to someone and it cost 10p per minute to call them!

I was told and by an advisor at an Indian call centre, someone will call within 24 hours 'with a full update' I am still waiting for it... no surprise there!.

I requested for the modem to be sent within 4 working days, but it turned up after 10! I've had nothing but problems since day 1 and they are still ongoing!

STEER CLEAR OF TISCALI! DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THEIR PRICES! IT'S CHEAP FOR A REASON!. VERY POOR ISP PROVIDER AND TELEPHONE COMPANY. I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND THEM TO EVEN MY WORST ENEMIES! THEY ARE THAT BAD!.

Been with Pipex for 6-7 years. Service isn't bad but has become expensive. Tech support has always been useless, speed has had occasional drop offs but mostly OK, DNS server is very unreliable.

Recently cancelled, and they're hassling me with phone calls and threatening letters.

They don't answer email to the customer services number. The contact phone number is a premium rate 0871 number.

Only way to get them to communicate is to complain to the ISPA.

I joined Tiscali in 2007 on the 8MB Home "Unlimited" package

I live aprox 0.5 miles from my exchange so can get very good speeds and at first everything was OK.

Then I started noticing I could only use P2P at about 4am and my general connection speed was very slow at all times.

I contacted tiscali tech support who were completely un-helpful and emailed me a standard fix procedure instructing me to delete my cookies (this was about the p2p port blocking, which they denied)

It was clear they didn't want to help so I asked for my MAC and was told I would have to pay the remaining 8 months charges - but luckily I read in a forum that if you get 3 FUP Warning Letters you can leave for free even if your still in the first 12 months, I just setup a DL manager to DL massive files during peak hours, got my 3 letters and got my MAC. :-)

I am now a very satisfied Namesco customer.