UK ISP Tiscali has passed a less than enviable milestone on ISP Review this week. With the addition of seven new complaints about their service, the provider has managed to top 100 complaints!

This makes Tiscali one of the most complained about service providers in ISPr's history. Not since the early days of unmetered dialup access have we seen such a high level of anger and frustration.

Admittedly 100+ complaints may not seem like much, but taken as a comparison against rivals BTO, AOL and Wanadoo, which haven't had anything near the same degree of problems, Tiscali looks abysmal.

Typically, when taken next to a large ISP's subscriber base, we are a small site with a few thousand visitors each day. Out of this just a handful may come from any single provider, making the "scale" of Tiscali's problems that much clearer.

Poor support and customer services, which in turn help to exasperate billing errors, remain the most frequent complaints. Here are a few examples from this week’s e-mails:

I have an ongoing issue with Tiscali with regards to their inability to stop charging me even though my account was cancelled more than year ago.
E-Mail By - Domagoj

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I have been with Tiscali for just over 6 months now. I originally subscribed to their 256kbps package @ 19.99 since at the time I only needed to use the internet for email or minor downloads.

I've always had problems where the connection would drop for several minutes (like dial-up) and reconnect by itself.
E-Mail By - Shayfur

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This is an on running complaint since I cancelled my account with them in June 2003. See attachment for the letter I sent. Basically they are still billing me, when actually they owe me money as they continued to take money from my ex-husbands access card. I have had letters from their credit agency saying they are going to collect payment!!
E-Mail By - Christine

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Typically these complaints are only samples of the full messages, many of which are quite long and clearly have a detailed history. What's worse is the human stress and psychological problems many express from their dealings with Tiscali.

In recent months Tiscali has endeavoured to improve matters by allowing sites, such as ISPr, to forward complaints that give us permission to do so. No doubt this has helped a "few" people, but it's sad that they’re still woefully unable to solve the long running internal administrative problems.

How many years have we been seeing this now? Will it ever stop or slow to a similar level as their larger rivals? We’ve heard excuses and statements, yet the problems have continued.