Tiscali hits 'undo' after bandwidth throttling chokes iTunes Tiscali has been forced to reverse a software installation on its bandwidth-throttling hardware, after it triggered complaints from customers who saw iTunes blocked during peak hours and other traffic slowed to a crawl. Engineers have now rolled back the installation, so access should be returned to normal during this evening' …
When I spoke to tech support they denied port blocking, despite the fact that during the late evening I couldn't even log in to my Napster account, let alone download anything. A quick double check with the 56k dial -up allowed immediate log in to my Napster account. Time to move ISP methinks.
It hasn't just been Tiscali - it's also affected Pipex users (like me) - owned by Tiscali. It's a shame that, judgeing by some of the Apple and Tiscali forum posts, quite a few users were driven to actions as extreme as re-installing Windows before the relevant helpdesks took a cool look at the pattern of complaints.
"Over the last week users have reported newly-blocked ports and sub-dial-up speeds of 10Kbit/s between 5pm and 9pm"
I would have loved to get 10Kbit/s when i was with Tiscali, apparently i was on a "bad line".
Now i'm with Entanet and i get over 850Kbit/s on the "bad line".
Maybe it's just coz tiscali are crap
I was off during the week for a day (Friday, I think) and the connection to tiscali was fine. I was getting DNS lookup timeouts looking for any other servers, mind.
Told 'em if I couldn't use the internet and that now they've stopped the 2meg line and introduced download caps, I'm leaving as soon as possible.
I don't P2P and, since I'm using Linux, can't view most of the "multimedia content" out there. I'm probably a very low user. I will probably never go over the minimum cap. But the key word is "probably". Would they be OK if I were probably to pay them (I asked them)?
I didn't want an 8meg line because I wouldn't be able to USE 8megs. All the faster download speed meant was that it would be earlier in the month before I went over the limit and was either blocked, throttled (so getting less than 8meg) or told to pay premium rates. So at 2megs I'd lose less bandwidth. That it isn't any good for IPTV or Movies On Demand isn't a problem: I'd only be able to view a handful in a month anyway, so I'm missing out on a handful of "content. Meh.
Stay well away! Was with them for months. Essentially, visiting a site like YouTube - which has moderately high bandwidth requirements - between 6 and 11pm warranted a warning letter about overusage... on their 'unlimited' packages! Not to mention the ~3 months of tech support pestering to get them to reconnect our service - during which time they were quite happy to charge me the full service cost.
As probably the only remaining happy Bulldog user, I guess this Tiscali cheapness will have to rub-off eventually :(
I get 16meg down / 1meg up 24/7, seemingly uncapped. I know I'm very lucky, but with stories like this, It's only a matter of time. I can't get cable where I live, and Be insist they can't provide their service to me- who else is there if you want a decent connection and don't mind paying extra for it?
Since Tiscali bought Pipex my freedom 2 surf broadband has been completely useless. Rubbish speeds during the day and in the evening despite paying for a decent package and a 50Gb limit I never reach.
I've had enough and received my MAC within hours of requesting it last week. They tried offering me £10 off my subscription, 2 months free and a free wireless router to make me stay (with a min 12 months contract) but I told them it wasn't the value that was the problem but the quality of service since the Tiscali switch. They were very understanding and the next email after that contained my migration code.
@Anna : technically, this is maybe no "port blocking", but instead "deep packet inspection"...
Such network equipements detect the type of traffic thanx to in depth IP analysis (and whatever the port). Then apply policing/shaping.
The main target is of course P2P, which increases the average bandwith per customer, and consequently backbone and transit costs.
Of course, nobody expects such DPI equipements to make mistakes and consider itunes traffic being P2P (just as your intelligent antispam may incorrectly mark a few mails as spam)...
This could never happen.
I am with eclipse and while it is one of the more costly options (£29.99/month), i get unlimited 18 hours a day, and a 50GB limit between 6pm-midnight, and it throttles (only between 6pm-midnight) after that, which isnt too bad since 50GB/month for just the evening period is probably enough for most people.
But i am surpirsed that there arent more premium services, they must recognise that there is a demand for this, people who would be willing to pay more to be able to do more, yet a lot of ISP's seem to have their top of the range product as "unlimited 8MB***, tiny text: 20GB/month cap" and then nothing above that,
perhaps its just that if they did offer a premium product it would be like admitting that their "unlimited" offers are nothing of the sort?
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i'm with sky, and luckily in the past 12 months have had very little problems, great connectivity and speeds, no throttling and i only pay £10 a month (ok, i have a sky subscription too, but the cheapest it works out is £26!)
tiscali have the marketing right to attract the punters who really don't have a clue, they just see a bottom line price, and think it'll give them everything they need. Then this happens, and they can't do anything!
bring back dial up?
I was using Tiscali at a friends house, and during the evening the Opera web browser was being blocked, and MS Outlook behaved strangely as well.
With Opera they must have been relying on the browser ID string, as if I changed Opera to pretend to be IE or Firefox I could suddenly access sites again, change it back and everything stopped. This happened every night between about 6 and 9:30
Most annoying, especially as Opera is my preferred browser on both MS and Linux, and I like to double check any web sites I design in IE, Opera and Firefox before launch.
Some of us were with Pipex, and weren't aware they were a toy ISP.
Unfortunately, you're right: The only way to get Pipex type quality now is to go somewhere else. Something I wish I'd done when I first read (here) that ticali had bought them, would have saved me being without for four weeks while they found me a MAC code.
I had to do a hefty download from a server last Thursday and was appalled that it took 4.5 hours. I guess that means it will take all day to return it.
Ho hum. Looks like my days at f2s are numbered too. If the standard of service is falling to Tiscali levels, I may as well use Sky and have the TV thrown in.
I have been with Tiscali for about 2 years and following initial difficulty over connection (resolved within 3 weeks) I have had a near faultless service. I have also recently been upgraded from 2mb to 8mb for nothing (although this actually translates to 0.8mb upgraded to 2.5mb).
I am an occasional YouTuber and torrentee and am very happy with the <£20 price especially as it comes with unlimited phone calls and line rental.
</advert>
Perhaps what is needed is a mass protest, where a large number of customers refuse to pay a percentage (say15-20%) of their bills, all the same time. All these customers could then send an identical letter explaining that there was now a new policy of throttling the payment of bills and how they understood that the company may be upset by this sudden reduction of expected returns but hey - you reduce the service - we reduce the payment for the service.
"Over the last week users have reported newly-blocked ports and sub-dial-up speeds of 10Kbit/s between 5pm and 9pm."
Ahhahahaha, glad to hear nothing's changed. I was with the shower of b******* for 9 months before finally getting out of my 12 month contract and going to ICUK - no throttling, no shaping, a cap, but at least I could possibly reach the cap if I tried hard enough...
In all honesty, no exagerating, I got better speeds in the evenings on 56k dial-up to Demon all those years ago.
There's nothing wrong with traffic shaping *per se*, but like all things, when it's done badly it's a nightmare.
The trouble with Tiscali is they (and many other ISPs) have the same business model as Northern Rock - they offer way more than they have the resources to back up. All they need to do is to be honest with their customers and say "ok, you can have 50GB/month at 16Mb/s but you pay for it. If you just want a web/email type package then it's nice and cheap"
But no, they effectively lie to get subscribers in, then realise they don't have the capacity or funds to actually provide what they offered when you signed the contract. It needs looking at by the regulators. Yeah I know - that's almost as big a joke as the broadband market.
So did "god" himself stick the boots in answer to his customer complaints or took one look at the average uploads per ISP and said "You bums suck , now pull the finger out and fix it now or else we will send in the legal cleaning team to assassinate all who stand between us and the suckers !"
I had a 12-month contract for Tiscali Broadband. During that 12 months they never *once* got the billing right. I'm not talking about £10 here or there, but additional charges of £150 or more for either services I hadn't received or things that had been advertised (and confirmed) as free. I got away at the earliest possible opportunity.
Traffic shaping has spread like a wildfire. Here in Brazil, there's no more options left for cable or DSL proveiders.
They all implemented traffic shapping (encryption isn't helping) and we are seeing 15kb/s on torrents, even at hours like 4am, on a 4 megs cable subscription.
There's no where to run
And of course, as it is our local custom, customers get it up the rear without lube so fat bastards can get fatter while counting money (that includes the gov.br consumer rights branch officials)
When I 'phoned to get a migration code Tiscali offered me the moon on a stick to convince me to stay. They offered me an upgrade which would be useless on my ageing and corroded phone line. They offered a reduction in price when really they should be charging more. They offered a router I already had. They offered me bundled weekend calls, and then offered peak time calls. They finally asked what I would like and I said no more packet shaping and carbon neutrality please, they said they couldn't offer me that so finally let me have a MAC. Ha!
For more than 6 years I recommended Pipex to a couple of dozen clients. Apart from the odd glitch they were reliable and their CS was pretty helpful, bordering on excellent on occasion. When I heard Tiscali had bought them out I wondered whether there would be any change of service....
Oh yes.
I now have clients (business users mostly) who are ringing me up and complaining about very slow speeds and time-outs on their Pipex connections. We've rung Pipex customer service who tell the client to re-jig their modems and perform tests using the BT access site and report back to Pipex...
Really.
I'm now in the process of helping them get MAC codes and move them all to an ISP more reliable and helpful.
@ross : to precise a few things :
ISPs pay for peak usage: this determines the size of the core network and the bill for transit carriers.
Unfortunately, everyone wants to use it's internet access at the same time (roughly between 6pm and 10pm).
And that's why ISPs tend to block P2P during peak hours to minimize this network peak. So max download/upload is not really relevant since it's not really how much but when.
@jon : how funny, if everybody starts downloading 5Mbit/s at the same time, there will be no ISPs and no internet any more. Unless you are willing to pay a few thousand pounds a month. Anyway, i'm not sure such a network is just technically feasable with today's equipments.
Btw, ISPs size their infrastructures for let's say a 50kbyte/s (400kbit/s) average usage per user.
With new usages coming (more youtube, more google tv, etc.), ISPs'future and business model is going to be quite interesting....
I was able to connect to play Call of Duty 4 on the Playstation 3 online for the first time today at around 5pm. Being a Tiscali customer I haven't ever been able to do that before (i can usually only connect between 12 midnight and 12 midday - the makers of COD are well aware of Tiscali and Pipex and there is a forum thread about it here - http://www.infinityward.com/community/forum/index.php?topic=9245.0
Anyway its now 7pm and i cant connect anymore so i guess Tiscali are up to their old tricks again.
Tiscali have been crap since I was still using dialup. I remember I was part of a relatively small ISP (in the large scale of things) called Lineone, which had a busy and interesting community of people. They had good site content and were generally quite useful. Then Tiscali took over, the community was all but shattered by changes they brought in to the forums, the service became worse and impersonal, and generally it just went to the dogs.
Then more recently I used Nildram, who at the time were an independent company with excellent service. Granted they weren't the cheapest, but they were excellent to deal with and consistently considered the best on adslguide.org. They, fairly recently, have been bought by Tiscali and since the reports on their service level have got worse and worse.
I've pretty much given up trying by now as I'm sure that eventually whoever I go with will be bought by some large company and ruined.
Hah - someone read my complaint post! Well, that's something.
It's definetly better since Saturday...I seem to have FTP etc back. Web has been slow a little, but it's all useable.
We've been with Tiscali for..3 years I think. First at my mothers on 512k, now here on 2mb. In all that time, as I'm sure I said in the post - we've had maybe 3 "tedious enough to be annoying issues". It's just annoying that it takes so long to get anything actioned.
The MK forum team do a good job..I'd much rather deal with them than pay to talk to someone I can't understand, who has no real knowledge of their system/windows/computers (or so it feels last time I spoke to India about a problem).
It's just a shame they're not given more powers to act as "full blown" helpdesk staff. They've always been able to assist in the issues and raise them to a level where the ineffective Tiscali management sit up and do something.
Try playing an online game with tiscali at peak time it's just not going to happen, Apparently online games move huge wads of graphical data up and down the connection when your playing, That was what i was told when I made a help desk call for a friend.
Needless to say ive been using a diffrent supplier and have allways warned friends who not to use.
I agree with all of the arguments against throttling, shaping, unlimited with the small print, etc. False advertising and should be prosecuted. ISPs have f'ed things up by giving away everything for next to free and are now trying to stuff a genie back in a bottle.
But you can't have everything for nothing. Does anyone remember when bandwidth allotted was based a little bit more in line with the actual cost to the carriers? Before the giant race for who could provide fastest service for the least amount of money......
Now that they've opened up this can of worms with $30 a month unlimited 15/mbps down 1/mbps up (over here in the states anyway), Telcos can't go back to a reasonable pricing model. They expect each user to download one song a day via iTunes, and never download videos or watch youtube.
All this was a brilliant idea when the largest files people were downloading were animated GIFs or flash files. Now that content is so bandwidth intensive even my grandmother would hit some of these limits. Throw in Windows patch Tuesday and several computers per houshold and again, we're using more bandwidth than our $30 is covering in cost.
For less than $400 a year an ISP is supposed to deploy the network, maintain it, perform upgrades, employ a call center for the boobs who download trojans/spyware and blame it on the ISP as well as tech support any network aware application you have that doesn't work, provide you with endpoint hardware to integrate your house with their network, record everything so that when you download kiddie porn/read militant websites it can be provided to the government on a whim, run and secure email (and in some cases web servers) for you, and do everything else under the sun.
Even if you said take the total revenue and divide it by total costs I'd tell you forget it. I wouldn't want to run an ISP. It reminds me of the insurance companies here in the states that insure for natural disasters and than cry for a government bail out when a natural disaster actually occurs.
Not saying that everyone should pay $1500 a month for internet service, but the price point needs to be higher if people are going to expect a minimal amount of performance.
Oddly enough my cable company seems to have been able to keep up a minimal set of network performance - subsidizing its internet access by doubling it's television cost over a five year period.
Thumbs down because there is no good solution where everyone wins.
Once again, there are the usual "should get <whatever the speed is> all day every day with no limits" posts.
GET REAL !
If you want that, then you CAN have it. I'm switching over tomorrow evening to a service with uncontended 6m symmetric unlimited connectivity (at work I'll hasten to add). Yes, 6mbps both ways, not shared with anyone else, and with absolutely no caps.
So, if that's what you want, you CAN have it. The only problem is that none of you whining b***ards will want to pay for it as it costs "quite a lot more" than your shared, capped, ADSL. Something in the order of 20x to 40x (or more) depending on what you compare it with.
So really it's a matter of "speed costs, how fast can you afford ?" - if you want more, then go to an ISP that offers it and pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, then shut the f*** up moaning about what you won't pay for !
Now, what is REALLY needed is for the ISPs to be honest and admit what they are selling, then people could make their own minds up where they want to sit on the cost vs capacity tradeoff. In that respect the old style ADSL where you were sold a speed and contention ratio was somewhat better - you would know (for example) that on a 512k 50:1 service you were only buying a guaranteed 10kbps service. I'd rather see services sold on a "comitted rate" basis (ie the rate you are guaranteed, 10kbps in the above example) but it's fairly obvious why the ISPs won't want to publish just how overcontended their service is.
If either of them had any teeth, then broadband suppliers would never have been allowed to state an "up to" maximum and no guaranteed minimum, but would instead have been required to state a GUARANTEED minimum and prohibited from publishing any statement about what they could expect above the guaranteed minimum.
Consequently, a reduction below the guaranteed minimum would constitute a service failure (and, sensibly, trigger a meaningful refund each time it happens).
Sadly, we're not going to get accountable ISPs until either somebody senior at OFCOM and ASA both resign, and/or their organisations be replaced by something more competent.
I am with Newnet and they suit my needs perfectly
from their pages
"Uncapped service - No traffic shaping or port blocking
NewNet does not operate a policy of managing traffic and traffic types on our broadband network. Many other ISPs introduce packet shaping and other measures to limit the available bandwidth so you do not experience your full broadband potential."
packages are from a tenner and if you are in the portsmouth area they do 'up to 24meg' but are 8meg everywhere else plus they are so confident that you will be happy that they have a tie in of only 1 month so you can try them without fear of being stuck with them and if you do go with them and they do something crap then you can bail out pretty quickly.
I have been with them for about a year and have had zero problems with them so have no hesitation in recommending them.
Once upon a time I could get free 0870 and 0845 calls with my pay monthly on 02 now I can't. Once upon a time I could get per second billing with VirginMedia on my land line now i can't.
The future is very simple when the market becomes saturated then you will have transparent pricing with premium service options at optimal prices. The problem is no ISP is willing to jump first and risk losing market share. The deepest pockets of the quad players like BT and Virgin will hold out as long as possible until they are sure limited damage can be done to their subscriber base.
So instead we have traffic shaping also known as bandwidth throttling which weaker players like Tiscali have to take (sink or swim). In this case the shaping policy by design or more likely by accident went wrong. It happens...
Smaller quality players are OK but I doubt in the end they will be able to withstand the price pressure of the premium services offered by quads. The smaller player profits just wont be big enough to fund the emerging technologies that me and you will be demanding.
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We don't want free internet. We want the service we thought we were getting when we signed up - you know, the "unlimited" thing.
Tiscali can sell whatever product they like, and traffic shape, port block, throttle, or DPI as they choose. What they CAN'T do, and what they are currently doing, is to sell a package that looks like 8Mbit/sec, no cap, and actually is something else entirely. That is what all the screaming and whining is about.
One more outage and I'm switching. The only other trouble I've had with Tiscali was at the start when I signed up for 2Mbps, but the line couldn't handle it so after a week or so they downgraded me to 1Mbps and I've been very happy until last week. On the Monday evening I rang tech support (automated service status said no issues) and I played along and rebooted the router and my MacBook in the right order and to my complete surprise the reboots fixed it. That was shortly after 10pm. The next night was the same, but I tried FF3 and Safari, which were both fine, but email was slow and Opera was unusable. Shortly after 10pm everything worked again as if by magic. The wednesday was the same, but got better slightly earlier. I know Opera has a bit-torrent client built in, but how many people use Opera's bit-torrent? I don't use it and I'm guessing most people who do use a dedicated client instead.
My friend had this issue with one of the games he plays
I phoned their support to help him out
At over an hour listening to "we are experiencing high call columes at present" at 10p - 20p+ a min i was told the following by an overseas call center manager :
1) He would not write anything other than "customer is not completely satisfied" in the call log ... when i pushed him he admitted they were reviewed and that was the reason. He still would not change it to something closer to the truth
2) The problem had been resolved
3) .... Well that problem had been resolved .... so it must be the impact of voice traffic > cue script on "how many telephones do you have"
4) We do not have access to the internet so cannot check forum posts on the matter to save time
5) After another 30min on hold I was told we are very busy at the moment can you call back
6) Cutoff twice but I had his name :D
7) lost the will to live 3 hours in being no closer to a resolution ....
CHANGE ISP NOW :)
Best advice I can give
Ian
http://www.infinityward.com/community/forum/index.php?topic=9245.0
I have asked for my MAC - any suggestions as to who is best / cheapest at providing unlimed / no port blocking / traffic management etc - was looking at this lot as they promise "No network contention, no port blocking, traffic shaping or bandwidth throttling: -
http://www.idnet.net/solutions/homeofficebroadband.jsp
Is there a catch?
Reading the horror stories over the Tiscali (and others) with there port blocking and traffic shaping got me thinking about my connection.
Been with BT Internet since 1995 and not once have I had any downtime or blocked ports. Torrents come down at 800kbs depending on seeds, Downloads from http sites are similar.
I actually have to limit d/l speeds at my end so I can use the connection for other things. I do hear them slated by some too, but it is down to individual experience with an ISP.
Fair enough im on the top package, but you pay £12 or so a month to Tiscali, then really what do you actually expect?
If your connection and speeds really make that much of a difference to the way you work and play, then im sorry but you have to pay for it.
Me I don't grudge a penny of it as I prefer to pay to get what I want and require from my ISP.
This all sounds sooo familiar. About a year ago the French ISP "Free" 'upgraded' some equipment. Result - forums full of people complaining that their broadband was slower than dialup. Free denied any port shaping of course, despite the fact that ordinary http/smtp traffic was fine, but anything else got zero throughput.
Unfortunately for a dozen people in my office alone "anything else" included SSL email, VPN, etc.; all the things needed to telecommute. It took Free *3 months* to finally react, which they did by blaming France Telecom. I hung in there, mainly because none of the alternatives offered the free US phone calls which is also very useful for telecommuting, but was on the point of biting the bullet and giving up when it finally got better. It's still crap, a month ago my ADSL was offline for 4 days, and they only returned my support call a week after it was fixed, but at least I get most of my 1Mbit/s, most of the time. No idea if P2P and torrents work, I've never tried them.
I know that you get what you pay for, but I live in the sticks are there aren't any reputable ISPs who'll let me pay them for decent service out here. My only real alternative is to go back to ISDN :(
Fradulent? Well, you might say that, but the last person who accused Free of fraud in an online forum got a lawsuit slapped on them, so I couldn't possibly comment, and remain:
AC
Well surprise, surprise I couldn't log on to Napster yesterday evening. I understand the concept of line contention, I understand that I'll get the service I pay for. My Pipex 'to go' account has a 15Gb per month limit, my typical usage is < 5 Gb. Yet, all of a sudden, I'm permantently on the naughty pipe, despite the fact I don't use P2P, one or two programmes a month are downloaded from BBC iPlayer, but even that's configured to downlaod only, no uploads. Oh well I wonder how long it'll take to get a MAC from Tiscali :-/
As an ex-Homechoice customer currently still on the old network I'm viewing this with absolute horror. We're all scheduled to be migrated onto Tiscali proper next month, and IPTV down the phone line is the only digital TV channel option I have.
If this is the future I'll be re-commissioning that second line I have lying dormant in the back bedroom and paying for ADSL 2+ from Be. You simply cannot go backwards with Internet speeds without really getting frustrated.
Paris because she's looking tearful, an emotion I may be sharing in a few weeks time.
I have been with Tiscali for just over a year now. Supply of modem and initial connection were fine and initially it was OK, although evening speeds were noticeably slower and browsing became flakey.
But gradually the service deteriorated ... slow speeds, disconnections, mail servers unavailable. At the end of May 2007, when mail failed for several days due to Tiscali's inept handling of a SPAM storm, we were told that e-mail was an "extra" and that we shouldn't rely on it. That's probably one of the few things they have been honest about ... lots of my e-mails disappeared into the ether.
Lately (since Christmas 2007), the service has been even worse for me with frequent disconnections and then inability to get authenticated for some time. I really couldn't recommend Tiscali to anyone and it's time for me to leave.
"My download speeds from Napster using my 'pipex' ADSL line were down to a whopping 3kb/s yesterday afetrnoon"
You should be ringing them up to thanks them - Napster sucks!! :)
On a serious note, this wreaks of the crap I went through with PlusNet a few years ago... one day my usenet downloads went from 4mb to 4k.... when I rang them they said I had downloaded more than 1GB of data via usenet and that I was now on a silver service until the next billing period - which was about 4 weeks away. Then they claimed I was making the speeds up, and I should have been getting at least a couple of mb, then they claimed I should go with a third party usenet provider (I already was). In the end, I left - at a cost of over £200 because they had reset my contract when I switched my line from my old house to the new.
This is why I now pay for decent ISP's... well, semi decent. Be have been having some router problems recently too.... might be time to look around again!
Tiscali's T&C's clealy state what the FUP covers - anything between 6pm&11pm... (okay, admittedly, they don't define exactly what heavy usage is, and if you ask them, they give you a BS answer along the lines of, "We can't define it exactly as it changes from day to day..." but you know that during their peak hours, you stick to web browsing and emails!)
If you're a heavy downloader, and I average about 20-30GB a day, Tiscali actually have a pretty decent policy, "Steer clear of our peak times, and we'll leave you in peace." For £18 a month, for a decent 8Mb line, I sure as hell ain't complaining with that.
I've been with Demon (who up until they upgraded their lines back in 2006 to the 8Mb and consequently changed their T&C's were pretty decent as well - but now cap you at 60GB, thereafter throttling you down to 128kbps during their peak periods) who're overpriced have crap customer service and nowhere near as reasonable fair use policy. I've been with BT, who quite frankly couldn't find their a*** from their elbow. And through my clients, I've seen a hell of a lot of problems with other providers as well (Eclipse probably being the worst one I've had to deal with.)
So seriously, stick to downloading outside Tiscali's peak hours, and they're actually pretty decent - the odd screw-up taken into account (not telling anyone their emails were disappearing into a black hole and throttling legit programs.)
- Happy Little Smurf
>>"My download speeds from Napster using my 'pipex' ADSL line were down to a whopping 3kb/s yesterday afetrnoon"
>>You should be ringing them up to thanks them - Napster sucks!! :)
Serious question : is there actually an alternative 'all you can eat' download service available in the UK, covering most mainstream labels / artists? With two teenaged daughters whose musical tastes change every 5 minutes,10 quid a month rental to Napster is actually a pretty cost effective solution for me. Plus they let me use it sometimes ;-)
Napster still seem to have an image problem, the majority of Pipex / tiscali "support" staff I've spoken to in the last few days seemed to think Napster is still some 'naughty' P2P service.
"Tiscali actually have a pretty decent policy, "Steer clear of our peak times, and we'll leave you in peace." For £18 a month, for a decent 8Mb line, I sure as hell ain't complaining with that."
Yes and no... That was what I used to do when I have a Pipex connection. Lasted many a year with my p2p client set to auto throttle from 6pm to midnight. Then when Pipex started looking as the bottom line total, I got the "You're a heavy user" letter, and I cleared off to Tiscali. (Silly me).
The problem with Tiscali is they block it completely. I happily schedule big downloads over night, but sometimes, you just need to get something during those peak times, and it's a complete no go. It's not throttled down, I can't even get a connection to the tracker! You're lucky if it's back by midnight.
They are just squeezing so many people onto their over-congested network. I can't believe they are inside their 50:1 contention ratio.
Luckily my contract is up in 2 months, and I'm off!
Last month, without any explanation, Tiscali's Homechoice customers were deprived of email for four days. I agree, companies that treat their customers with contempt are in fact fraudsters because all the promises, tacit and explicit, that they make in their marketing they sweep aside without a moment's thought or concern
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