Over the past couple of weeks a growing number of Tiscali's broadband customers, specifically those that play the popular massively multiplayer online (MMORPG) game EVE-Online.com, have been unable to play at certain times of the day.

Those that have complained to Tiscali seem to get mixed messages, from some being told that the ISP "does not support gaming" to others that claim the customer will be called back and yet they never do:


Naturally a long topic has started on EVE-Online's discussion forum regarding the problems, which can be read HERE. The information appears to suggest that Tiscali's traffic management could well be to blame as the problems only appear to occur during the time periods when it is being employed.

It's unclear why EVE-Online is so suddenly being identified for such restrictions, multiplayer games are deliberately designed to avoid consuming lots of data as they require fast response times to be playable.

The issues are not completely dissimilar to others that have been occurring during the year (here). In some cases the problems can improve after customers are switched from the ISP's BT based IPStream ADSL platform to their Datastream one, but not always.

Likewise the problems do not appear to be completely isolated to Tiscali users either, with some of Pipex customers suffering from similar issues. If these don't clear up then some gamers have suggested a more radical solution, bypassing the ISP's filtering platform altogether - details. That or change provider, which is sometimes easier said than done with Tiscali.