Tiscali

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.