Carphone Warehouse coffers hit by broadband rollout

Carphone Warehouse's faltering entry into the broadband dogfight cost the firm 10 per cent of its profits compared to last year, the company said this morning. Overall pre-tax profit tumbled 9.5 per cent to £123.1m. Group revenue for the financial year rose to £3.99bn, from £3.05bn a year ago. In the 12 months to 31 March, its …

[Matt Brigden]

Under control ? Your having a laugh .

I moderate on a broadband forum and our busiest section by far is the TalkTalk section . Every user saying the same thing . The service is unreliable and slow if it works at all .

They make supporting it a nightmare by changing what kit they ship to customers as they go along .

The tech support lines come in for the heaviest critiscism , most users are under the impression they are told to lie to customers to get them off the phone with the promise of a non existant call back .

Like 99% of ISP's they just dont care for the customers anymore .

[Turbojerry]

What about us AO-Hellers?

Joined AOL last year for the unlimited downloads (no FUP), and had an excellent service, I've now had a snotty letter from AOL complaining that I'm downloading over 60GB/month on their unlimited plan, because they now have a Fair Use Policy that I didnt sign up to nor have been advised of, I now get 512K from 6pm until 12am on my unlimited 8mbps connection and threatened with termination, presumably with extreme prejudice. I'm sure with YouTube, Joost. Linux ISOs and rest many more people will end up like me in AO-Hell before deserting for a better service elsewhere. Look for directors to start offloading shares as quickly as we users offload AOL.

[Matt]

yeah i know i'm starting that 'unlimited' argument again

but how do you use 60Gb or more a month on joost and youtube? Joost uses about 1Gb every 10 hours, so are you watching it 20 hours a day for a month? Youtube uses a very negligable amount of b/w, and unless you download the same linux iso's 3 times a day and delete them again, I still fail to see how you get to 60Gb p/m.

Please note, i'm not making the accusation (that most people seem to jump to) that you are using torrents or p2p etc illegally, in fact i think i'm a fairly heavy user of my bandwidth, but i don't justify that any of it is legal. I'm just curious to know how people come to justify that quantity themselves.

[Turbojerry]

How I used over 60Gb last month

Downloaded QEMU emulator so I could compile and test a cross platform app I have been working on, plus ISOs for 2 Linux distros (32 and 64 bit), Solaris 10 (x86 and SPARC), Darwin + various toolkits for each, Wikipedia db, Project Gutenburg DVD, DMOZ Open Directory data, WordNet, OpenCyc and a few other DVD size chunks of open source data, updates for various apps etc etc, well over 60GB and that's only the dev stuff, and yes Bittorrent is excellent for grabbing distro ISOs thanks.