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Tiscali Upgrade Trouble

JJD

0
With my local BT exchange upgrading last month I enquired with Tiscali about moving from dial-up to broadband. I wanted to keep my original lineone.net email address and asked if this would be possible. I was told I could, although I would also get a new tiscali.co.uk address that I wouldn't have to use.

I placed an order and eventually got the modem on 17th August. After calls to Tiscali Broadband support it took calls to SAGEM, the modem manufacturers, to get connected as I am an Apple Mac user and the CD-ROM with modem drivers did not support OS X Tiger.

Having got everything working I then cancelled, as advised by Tiscali, my dial-up Surftime package as well as cancelling my second phone line with BT.

This I did on 19th August and was then unable to reach my lineone.net email address. Calls to Tiscali ensued on 20th August and I have been told as I cancelled my dial-up subscription I have lost my old email address. They appear to have refused to even consider if it could be restored. My suggestion of restore from data backup has not been seen as an option. Surely Tiscali, a business that is so computer based, must do regular backups? If so why is restoring so alien to them? Surely the whole idea of backup is to be able to undo mistakes?

Has anyone else suffered in the same way? If so have you had any success in getting your old email address back?
 
Unfortuantley with respect to the cancellation, when the account is halted, everything goes with it. In general it is the customer's responsibility to maintain data backups, rather than the ISP. Now you may be able to claim some recompense, citing that the customer service staff provided you with inaccurate advice which was a direct cause of the loss of the data; they may be able to sort you out with a free month as a goodwill gesture. With regards to the surftime package however, what I personally advise customers to do is to always downgrade the account to Pay As You Go rather than cancel; you've got two or three months of using the email address/webspace before it gets cancelled due to inactivity, and if you're using broadband then you're not incurring any charges on dial-up either.

The modem situation is awkward. I'm on tech support for an ISP and the Speedtouch drivers don't work with OS10.4 either. Even then, the only option we find is to advise the customer to download the updated drivers over a pay as you go connection.

I suspect that the @lineone.net email address was linked to your surftime account, which would have died with the cancellation. Your only course here is to try and get the surftime account reactivated on a pay as you go tarriff, and dial in every two months or so to keep it active.

Good luck :)
 
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Thanks for that advice. I'll see if Tiscali can restore the acount as a 'Pay As You Go' account.

My thoughts on backup did not relate to anything other than Tiscali's data for accounts, as I had no personal data or website that required access through that account.
 
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aha, my apologies. I thought you was referring to email or hosted files on your webspace that were lost during the cancellation; check me out jumping the gun :D

Give it a go anyway; at our ISP we can still see cancelled and dormant accounts, and it's quite easy to reactivate (even if you do have to wait a while and provide more payment details) :)
 
my advice would be to keep away from tiscali at all costs..... i finally got away from them, after many months of nightmares..... if there is an oppurtunity to get something wrong... then Tiscali can be guaranteed that they will take that route.....
 
I've still not got this sorted. The phone number I was told to call is only manned from 9.00 to 5.00. My work means it is difficult to get time to call it. I've tried once this week and was in a queue for about 10 minutes before i had to hang up and get back to work as my break was over.
 
you will never win with tiscali. The only solution is to leave them. it took me many months of wasted time, sometimes spending 2 hours on the phone each morning chasing them around an then getting nowhere.

never attempt to get anything back from them. The only way to escape is cut your losses and make a clean break....
 
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Tiscali have now managed to put a 'forward' command on my lineone.net e-mail address but insist that they cannot restore an account that has been closed. It beggars belief. I shall be writing to them. They say they record all calls to their staff and will be able to check to see if I was told closing my Surftime package subscription would end that e-mail address. If they can do that why can't they retore a closed account? I was told it was their 'golden rule' to ensure customers were told this. The person who I last spoke with said my problem was perhaps experienced by one in fifty customers upgrading. Even getting 2% foul up on retention of e-mail address is too much in my book.
 
Tiscali will fob you off till the cows come home. The only thing you can do is to give them a date to do something by. If they dont then start some sort of action.

Tiscali is well known for its total lack of care.
 
I'm having major trouble trying to get Tiscali to provide the broadband speed they are charging me for, but my Lineone address didn't go with my dial up account and, as a POP3 account, I don't see why it should. I had to set up a new address for broadband, and as this has a spam filter with it, I diverted the lineone address to this, and carried on using lineone as my main address.
 
no surprise there on the speed problems... I was getting 900bps yes!!! thats is correct not a typo... nine hundred bits per second!!! only of rare occasions, ie like at 3am did I ever get faster than old analogue dial up.....

After all the excuses and lies from Tiscali... I am with another ISP.... I now have a 512kpbs connection that always works at over 430kbps... even during periods when you would expect the contention ratio problem to have an effect....

There is no solution to Tiscali. Apart from leaving them.
 
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Well I've decided on Eclipse Evolution Option 2 and have just signed up and taken their 1 month free trail too :)

I do have 1 more question, is my SAGEM F@st 800/840 modem going to be good enough to handle the speeds. I've been reading that you need a modem which can handle 8mb speeds and I can't find anywere that says mine can (not even the makers website), any idea's?

I want to say a big thankyou to all of you who helped me out, your input was most valued and I listerned to everyones advice.
 
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