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Well - gave Titan a chance, but.....

I previously posted about being forcibly moved by Titan from a reasonable Enta connection to Vispa.

It really wasn't possible (given the short time frame) to do anything other than 'suck it and see'

Well, have sucked, and seen, I'm off.

Titan bowed to pressure and reinstated off-peak weekends - great, but they are obviously throttling the life out of weekend connections. So much so that a 311 Mb driver download from HP has now taken several hours!!, and is still not complete.

Then there's the Vispa usage monitor. According to that, my peak rate use has been clocking up all weekend - despite being supposedly off-peak....

I simply can't be bothered with either Titan or Vispa any more. I intend to get my MAC, and then I'm offski.
 
If you're looking for an alternative and can't get a good unbundled ISP like Be Broadband then check around Xilo, IDNet and others as they recently pushed up their usage allowances.
 
If you're looking for an alternative and can't get a good unbundled ISP like Be Broadband then check around Xilo, IDNet and others as they recently pushed up their usage allowances.



Thanks, I have contacted Xilo, and hope to join them in the near future.

The speed, btw, suddenly shot up a 7.40 am - from an average of 10 kpbs to 350 + - thus adding to my suspicion that it was being mercilessly throttled during the weekend unmetered period.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Titan - if only Enta had kept their eye on the ball last year and prevented those outages, then (presumably) everyone would still be happily using the Enta network.

I can say that I've been with Titan for quite a long time, and have never had a billing issue with them (or Enta) and would have been happy to have remained with them - but speeds like an asthmatic dial-up modem that's about to give up and die, simply won't cut it these days ;)

I can only wish them well for the future, but sadly, I have to go.
 
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Hi Geist,

Can you just clarify who you were paying for your Internet service, Titan or Vispa directly? It's just that I see you have posted a review for Vispa as well but the fact that Titan has some kind of supply agreement with Vispa does not actually make you a Vispa customer :). Otherwise everybody rating BT based ISPs might as well review BT too, but this would not be an accurate reflection.

Supply deals can be very different from the service you might expect to recieve when taken from the supplier directly. Suffice to say that unless your contract is with Vispa then the Vispa review would not be valid, if you see what I mean. Sorry to be a pain but we try to keep the system fair :) .
 
There is a post about a problem with a misconfiguration on some of the new equipment Vispa took on to handle the Titan customers; apparently they have been tearing their hair out trying to figure out what was wrong.

Supposedly a temporary "fix" is in place as of last night; although the fault also masked a bandwidth problem; they are ordering more bandwidth from BT, so fingers crossed.
 
Hi - no problem, if you feel the review isn't valid, pull it by all means.

Titan/Vispa seem inextricably linked - perhaps to Titan's detriment because Vispa call the shots on bandwidth allocation and fault resolution.

This, btw, is not what Titan told me before the forced migration. Then, the story was that Titan leased bandwidth from Vispa, was responsible for it, and could allocate it in any way they saw fit.

This jars, somewhat, with Vispa's forum announcement that Titan & Vispa customers have 'been separated' since....yesterday! Prior to that, they were lumped together.

One can only assume that Vispa (naturally) want to keep their own customers happy, and that the influx of Titan customers had adversely affected the network - hence the weeding out.

Vispa also announced that Titan customers were being subjected to restricted P2P speeds - thus reinforcing the fact that it's Vispa, not Titan, with their hands on the control levers (again, as you;d expect, as it's *their* company)

Upshot seems to be that Titan customers are destined to be very much a second-class citizens in Vispaworld.

For what it's worth, my payment mandate is in favour of Vispa, not Titan - which I assumed qualified me to give an opinion on the Vispa service.

It's not important, though - and if you feel it needs removing, no hard feelings.

Frankly, I'm just waiting to get as far away from the Titan/Vispa/Abel/Uncle Tom Cobbley shambles as I can!

Would it be unkind to suggest that Titan add the letters, 'i' & 'c' to their name? ;)
 
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"Vispa also announced that Titan customers were being subjected to restricted P2P speeds"

Where did you read that?? The MD of Vispa is telling Titan users on the Vispa forum that there is no block on P2P beyond normal traffic management; P2P is allowed to take up to 80% of available bandwidth OffPeak.

Unless you are referring to the problem I mentioned before; in which case you are being a little dishonest.

PS, ALL of us have been having problems, not just Titan customers; my P2P speeds went from 300KBPS to under 25KBPS, and sometimes down to 1KBPS
 
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"Vispa also announced that Titan customers were being subjected to restricted P2P speeds"

Where did you read that?? The MD of Vispa is telling Titan users on the Vispa forum that there is no block on P2P beyond normal traffic management; P2P is allowed to take up to 80% of available bandwidth OffPeak.

Unless you are referring to the problem I mentioned before; in which case you are being a little dishonest.

PS, ALL of us have been having problems, not just Titan customers; my P2P speeds went from 300KBPS to under 25KBPS, and sometimes down to 1KBPS



Please don't accuse me of being dishonest.

Here's what Vispa said in their own forum on 23rd Feb: 10.37 pm

P2P is slow at the moment as it's restricted for TitanADSL users whilst we fix this speed issue. P2P just complicates everything as it will use 100% of the bandwidth if we let it [end quote]

OK?

That was posted by J Ormerod - who also claimed, in the same 'Trottled 'til midnight' thread that only Titan customers are affected by the issues. (low speed)

The issue is now only affecting TitanADSL users [end quote] 23rd Feb 8.57 pm

OK?

It seems to me that Vispa need to recruit a more well informed fan-boy!
 
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J Ormerod is Vispa manging Director

Yes, so I understand.

It's all over for me, though - by this time next week Titan & Vispa will be history.

Maybe they'll make it work (and I hope they do, for the sake of the other subscribers) but I'm afraid I won't be around to know about it.

I feel confident that I've made the right decision - and that has to be my last word about the subject.

Life is just too short to be worrying about pings, and latency, and caps, and all the other techno-baggage that seems to have popped up since the transfer to Vispa.

I don't find myself having to telephone my electricity supplier because the voltage is low, or the amperage insufficient - and I don't want to have to keep chasing a BB supplier because the speed is slow, etc

My final observation is that the government's dream of 'Broadband Britain' seems as far away as ever - and the reality is of people constantly roaming around in herds, all looking for an ISP who can offer a decent reliable service on a regular basis.

Until such provision is the norm, the digital utopia just isn't going to happen!

That's it from me, anyway - and thanks to ispreview for help given.

Cheers.
 
Yes, so I understand.

It's all over for me, though - by this time next week Titan & Vispa will be history.

Maybe they'll make it work (and I hope they do, for the sake of the other subscribers) but I'm afraid I won't be around to know about it.

I feel confident that I've made the right decision - and that has to be my last word about the subject.

Life is just too short to be worrying about pings, and latency, and caps, and all the other techno-baggage that seems to have popped up since the transfer to Vispa.

I don't find myself having to telephone my electricity supplier because the voltage is low, or the amperage insufficient - and I don't want to have to keep chasing a BB supplier because the speed is slow, etc

My final observation is that the government's dream of 'Broadband Britain' seems as far away as ever - and the reality is of people constantly roaming around in herds, all looking for an ISP who can offer a decent reliable service on a regular basis.

Until such provision is the norm, the digital utopia just isn't going to happen!

That's it from me, anyway - and thanks to ispreview for help given.

Cheers.


Ahem! - 'last comment', notwithstanding, I thought it might be useful to post some 'real life' stats on this miserable excuse for an internet service.


What I've noticed is that after midnight (which is the start of the unmetered period) the speed all but vanishes.

Speedtests still show a decent average - but, in reality, the service (sic) is as dead as Monty Python's parrot.

I don't do P2P, so I don't know if it's a case of regular users being sacrificed to keep the P2P crowd happy, or whether Titan/Vispa simply make the entire service unusable for downloads during the unmetered period.

I've been using a driver download from HP as a test file - it's 311 MB, from a reputable mainstream source.

After 12 pm, without fail, the download crawls along at speeds ranging from 2.185 KB/S (which estimates a whopping 44 hours to get the file!) to a less than sprightly 11.2 KB/S (*only* 8 hours!)

Come the morning, however, and things perk up - 411 KB/S today - only a 12 minute download.

These aren't 'one off' results - *everything* (well, everything that I use) goes to sleep at 12 midnight. You Tube is unwatchable, downloads simply die - and as for i-player, well, that's just having a laugh, innit?

As I said, I don't know if the P2P boys are rip-roaring along, but I do know that any 'ordinary' users effectively have no service between the hours of 12 midnight & 8 am!

This is. imo. tantamount to deception - 'Yep, we give you unmetered periods of access - but, Nope, you can't actually download anything, or watch anything, during that time"

BOY!! - am I glad that my own ordeal with Titan/Vispa is nearly at an end! If this goes on, I'll be surprised if they have a single customer to bless themselves with in six months time!
 
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If its any consolation, my speeds, both browsing and P2P, before and after midnight last night were DIRE; pages that should take a few seconds to load were either not loading properly or taking minutes, file transfer speeds were equally bad and P2P was sub 35KBPS other than one short lived spike to 71KBPS.

I am a Vispa, NOT Titan customer.
 
If its any consolation, my speeds, both browsing and P2P, before and after midnight last night were DIRE; pages that should take a few seconds to load were either not loading properly or taking minutes, file transfer speeds were equally bad and P2P was sub 35KBPS other than one short lived spike to 71KBPS.

I am a Vispa, NOT Titan customer.


Are you going to stay with them?

I appreciate that you're a Vispa customer - but my own take with Titan is that their business model with Vispa didn't envisage unmetered weekend use.

Certainly, when I questioned Titan about the absence of weekend daytime unmetered time, I was told that "It's something we'll look at reinstating (as per Enta) in the future"

Obviously, there was a considerable fuss raised by Titan customers, with the result that the future came forward a bit too quickly :laugh:

Problem is, that particular future was presumably never costed for - so, what to do?

The solution appears to have been to slow down the connection and make bandwidth use almost impossible. One would expect this to happen during the previously uncosted weekend daytime hours, but perhaps the temptation to apply it across the entire unmetered spectrum was just too much to resist?

Dunno why Vispa customers are suffering as well - unless the 'separate; bandwidth that Titan initially spoke of *isn't* quite as 'separate' as they wanted customers to believe, and perhaps there's no viable way of differentiating between the two user groups.

Innocents suffering with the guilty?

I'm not sure how much faith one can place in the various pronouncements from Vista, anyway. After all, they've been using the '10 day line training period' as a convenient fob-off for dissatisfied users - despite, apparently, there being *no* such 'training period' applicable to migrations from other ADSL providers.

Perhaps it's easier to buy time with such unfounded techno-babble than it is to actually buy enough bandwidth to solve the problems?

Speaking for myself, I sho' will be glad to be free come nex' week, right 'nuff! :laugh:
 
Well....after the service last week, I'm leaving after the migraion to Vispa too - I for one never had any issues with Entanet, and unfortunately it's been downhill since...

Just to note, I would also advise checking your invoices, as I was overcharged by Vispa, they very promptly responded, so I'd suggest just double-checking to ensure it's correct.
 
Sorry about the delay in replying, I managed to pick up a rootkit from somewhere!!!

I think Vispa have taken on too much for them to handle all at once; they will eventually sort it all out, but it is not doing their reputation any good; and they are going to lose customers.
If things dont improve during March, I will be looking around to see what is available.
 
Well, touch wood; my non P2P downloads have been lightening fast after midnight for the past 2 nights, and not too shabby between 6pm and midnight either.
P2P is still fairly cr@p, below 25KBPS for 99% of the time; but that might just be the torrents I am currently downloading, ALL of them have been dragging along for over a month due to a shortage of seeders.

Still getting a regular hiatus while browsing, but it doesn't seem to affect FTP or P2P, only HTTP/HTTPS, so I suspect my phone line needs changing again.
 
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:laugh:
Well, touch wood; my non P2P downloads have been lightening fast after midnight for the past 2 nights, and not too shabby between 6pm and midnight either.
P2P is still fairly cr@p, below 25KBPS for 99% of the time; but that might just be the torrents I am currently downloading, ALL of them have been dragging along for over a month due to a shortage of seeders.

Still getting a regular hiatus while browsing, but it doesn't seem to affect FTP or P2P, only HTTP/HTTPS, so I suspect my phone line needs changing again.


Hi - glad things seem to be getting better for you. Perhaps it's because so many Titan customers are leaping from the deck of the ship in sheer desperation? :laugh:

My initial experience of Xilo is very positive - things just seem to 'work', and keep working, which is all one can ask really.

Their tech support seems fine - they answer promptly, and are currently working with BT to resolve a line issue that only came to light because their user control panel is good (Titan never had one, and Vispa's feeble effort just didn't work)

I've seen 4Mb downloads - which probably doesn't seem much to cosmopolitan urbanite's, but is the fastest I've ever experienced on the end of a 3.8 KM line in the country, where wooden poles carry the lines!

Titan never even came close - barely half that speed. Vispa (for the short time I was with them) did give a consistent 3 meg speedtest - but the actual downloads were dire, especially after midnight.

Xilo, on the other hand, are most certainly not throttling anything at any time. I don't do P2P but other stuff is fast whatever the time of day or night.

I have one purely selfish regret, Because they are so good, Xilo are going to pile on customers like a fat woman piles on the pounds at a cream cake festival! I foresee trouble ahead as the whole thing gets bigger and bigger. Enta were once brilliant, but eventually they seemed to crash under their own weight.I'd be very sad if this ever happened to Xilo (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of a new customer complaining about the possibility of too many new customers )

They should have closed the door after they connected me!.......:laugh:
 
Being urban isnt everything, I have my own problems; mainly caused by the ignorant factory owners across the road.
They have a row of trees that have grown unchecked for 30-40 years and now keep ripping the BT junction boxes off of the telegraph poles and pulverising the cables that are tangled in the branches.

If you go back 20 years, BT would come along and cut back the trees, then bill the owner, these days they wont do a thing, so I have to get my line replaced every couple of years with the expectation that line quality will start dropping off again within months.
 
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