Comments on: Best Broadband deals - Virgin BT Tiscali or SKY

By: vince

vince — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:03:27 +0000

I am currently with tiscali and have been for 2 years now! i am currently having trouble with strangled speed and i am not a high user, i was expecting this throttle as they did the same to me last year ,when the dark nights come and kids take to games and downloading music ect tiscali mess about with all there customers band speed it dont matter if your a low user or not! thit is my experience todate,but if you complain they will give you a discount to make you feel bettet? Having said all this i have little faith in any of the others i think they all work the same way.

By: Bill Clowery

Bill Clowery — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:54:39 +0000

Yes I was very happy with Tiscali, until I changed address. I had everything arrange with a no hoper on the other end of the line. My new line was set up and my contract was being continued to my new address. Came live on the 17/07/08 recieved a letter that this was the date that I could start going live.Then It happened I recieved another letter from Tiscali saying that Thankyou for my custom and sorry that I was cancelling with them and they had cut me off a day later. I lost all my important emails and could not retrieve them in any way.
Contacted them but again full of apologies and said that Iwould have to wait until they took the Tag off the line (10 to 15 days)
Please be carefull who you are speaking to. or dont touch them at all.
Regards
Bill Clowery

By: andy stevens

andy stevens — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:06:49 +0000

ive just signed up for tiscali broadband 2 weeks ago. and i must say the service have been brilliant, im getting 8Mg Broadband (actually 7.6 but im not goin to complain about 0.4Mg lol) Free Phone Line Rental with free calls to any house phone in most of the world including mobiles in canada and usa any time 24/7 So I Never have to deal with BT again, and Digital TV which Goes Through My Phone Line. Im Paying 19.99 pcm and thats where it will stay for the first 3 months only increasing to 24.99 never increasing after that…. and when they say unlimited they wernt jokin. my download speed has never dropped more than a Couple of KBs either way and they even waivered the conection fee of £30. but i think that offer is finished now but when you think i was paying £49.50 pcm to sky for my tv, £15 pcm (paid quaterly) to bt for my line rental and 19.99pcm for my BB. im saving £65 Quid A Month lol. so im really happy lol.

By: David

David — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:11:26 +0000

I had various problems when VM took over, the latest oproblem been going on a while, phone calls were made, complaints were made via on-line support all a total waste of time even two recorded letters remained unanswered, I got on to the ISPA, after the third complaint with them they escalated the problem (slow outgoing emails) to CISAS. It’s surprising how quickly VM can do things when they want..!

During this time I spoke to engineers and a member of VMs CEO many times. After the last engineer came for the third time the fault mysteriously cleared at 9.01pm that evening, this was after it has been fixed the previous week, server problems was to blame.

I formatted a hard drive with just windows XP and nothing else… it was still the same, I blew a gasket when told it was my firewall or Antivirus..! Yes I did check the modem upstream power levels which should be between 33dBmV (allowing 3dbmV or drift).

The excuses ranging from no fault found, a server problem and traffic congestion amongst others, yes even in the wee small hours before daybreak downloading Emails no problem mind.

I suggest VM engineers are either clueless, Virgin Media is crap if the excuses offered are valid or I was being fobbed off - I believe it was a bit of the lot… and no fault about this on the status page ever.

Customer services are nothing more than pathetic…. once I was without phone and internet for over a day… I went down the road to check a elderly neighbors phone - dead it was, so I rang CS telling them this and that it must be a network fault, “Oh, theres no issue we’ll get an engineer out to check your wiring, my reply is unprintable… “I also complained about wasting about £7 on a mobile phone I had just topped up…

… “You should have dialed the free 150 number”, I politely asked… “How the hell can I do that when the phones are not working?” Virgins Media CS just makes you wanna tear your hair out.

If you want speed and a unreliable service with poor CS support do join VM… I’m about to get a landline installed and look elsewhere.

By: Quentin

Quentin — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:54:24 +0000

I’m with PlusNet (Option 3) myself -£19.99 per month, up to 8mb and 30GB download limit.

By: Steve Purkiss

Steve Purkiss — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:03:36 +0000

Just a quick update - I’ve just re-ordered my old service from ukfsn.org - £34.99pcm for 2Mb unlimited, no caps, no throttle, and great tech support should you need it. A must for anyone who uses the internet a lot.

By: Steve Purkiss

Steve Purkiss — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 16:27:23 +0000

Thanks for the mention - actually I’m still on Virgin at the moment. The credit department suggested that it may just be because it’s a new connection with them, however it seems to be ‘going slow’ from around 3pm until the early hours of the morning, which suggests a throttle.

Trouble is, I can’t really afford to go back to my old supplier so I may just have to put up with it, which sucks when they don’t tell you exactly what is classed as ‘acceptabe use’ - they say they throttle the top 5% but won’t say how much it is, so rather than being able to watch your usage (still a bad thing on a supposedy ‘unlimited’ service), you just take pot luck.