Written By : Wayne Brooker
January 2005

You may be wondering why I can't use email. Well it starts like this:

If you can't see that, it's the usual "Your POP3 server has not responded in 60 seconds" warning. After clicking that a couple of dozen times it just craps out completely, and that's with just 2 emails. You can imagine the problems I had before I used a Wanadoo connection to purge the 400+ emails that were in there originally. I now have to collect every few minutes and get them a couple at a time or I've no chance.

But what about the forums? Well, they've though of that too. Post something in there that they're not happy with and they just lock the thread, or delete it entirely! At least that's what they did with me!

I used the following text in an attempt to get them to keep my post up

This was of course promptly deleted from the support forums. Remarks made in response to a request like this are meant only for the eyes of the already ensnared, having it seen by innocent potential customers in an article like this one would be financially rather dangerous. Other posts that were more carefully crafted so as not to contravene any rules simply had the links and email addresses removed, making them all but useless. I got what I needed by other means though :)

For the record, my connection tonight is faster than it's been for 5 days. Here's what I'm getting from them currently (24th January 2005):

Not great but at least I can use emails at this speed, though I get the certain feeling that I've not yet seen the last of sub-1K/sec speeds

Update** It's 2AM GMT January 25th 2005 so I headed over to ATi to grab some drivers and immediately noticed the speed was down again, a fact confirmed when I started downloading :(

I should only have a 6.5 hour wait at a whopping 449 Bytes/sec. I tried a few other sites too just in case ATi were having a bad day. I got between 339 Bytes/sec and 449 each time. I also tried the speed test again but gave up after 1.5 hours.

Update: Speed test performed 25th Januaryt at 1:41PM

No real reason for this other than to show that things aren't any better during the day.

With all these facts in mind, perhaps it's not entirely surprising to see that Tiscali are financially in rather a mess. In fact they are currently selling subsidiaries in Switzerland, South Africa, Norway, Austria and Sweden to try and wipe out some of their heavy debts. I guess greed catches up with everyone in the end, and perhaps if Tiscali had put levels of service before their drive for global domination they'd be making some money by now.

Of course I could just be unlucky, like the thousands of other unhappy customers, but I think not....

ISPReview in September 2004 remarked that "This makes Tiscali one of the most complained about service providers in ISPr's history"

Quotes found over on the forums at The Scream include:

"I cannot emphasise enough the dismal, appalling service given by this lamentable organisation, who recently, and proudly announced a record number of new subscribers to their broadband service. What their new customers don't know yet but soon will is the utter contempt with which they are treated once they have signed up and committed themselves to a yearly contract."

"I estimate that I have spent a total of 15 hours of unnecessary time trying to resolve these issues due to the incompetence of your “help service” for which I also seek reimbursement."

" I've wasted hours trying to find what the real problem was. Tiscali knew all along but were obviously quite happy to waste my time, money, and patience. They do not give a damn about us, the paying customer!! I will copy my letter of complaint to Tiscali, to all of the mentioned contacts. including any local and national newspapers.
They do not deserve customers."

From Complaints.com

"I feel that I have been legally robbed in broad daylight and I will never in my life become a customer of Tiscali again. Claiming money for a service which has never been used once by me is a straight-forward attempt to extort money from a subscriber. I demand that Tiscali must refund me my money as it is illegal to claim money for a service which has never been provided. My agones against such injustices will continue and I shall leave no stone unturned to highlight Tiscali's misdeeds."

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So in a nutshell, what we've discussed is an unlimited broadband service which in reality imposes incredibly low usage limits, has woefully low connection speeds for many users, involves the need to monitor it constantly for price changes, suffers the inability to migrate away from them then possibly ties up your line when you do, provides minimal customer support and, through over zealous business acquisitions, who are inefficient, financially stretched and rather a dinosaur.

But let's be fair here, I've no doubt that Tiscali aren't the only company who screw up, or who have more than a couple of unhappy users, Rolls Royce have them, Leica have them, Rolex have them. The difference is that Tiscali have no clear customer service strategy, no obvious capacity for problem diagnosis and resolution and give no clues that they give a damn who you are or what your problem is. I've also no doubt there are many tens of thousands of people who've had no problems at all with their service, in fact I was one of them, but you can't really judge an umbrella until it rains, and this particular umbrella is about as much use as tits on a bull. But this isn't a recent thing, Tiscali's reputation has been questionable since they entered this arena, which begs the question of why I signed up to begin with. Hey, we all make mistakes right, but it would be remiss of me not to at least try to stop others doing the same.

Nobody realistically expects 100% 24/7 from Tiscali, or any other service sector business, in fact many users over there would settle for 50% 12/5. What's needed is honest, open communication and a network support team who can either correct the problems that users are having or who are prepared to step forward and admit that they have more users than they have the network and manpower capacity for.

Tiscali harvest customers using false promises of unlimited accounts, then keep them by making it as difficult as possible to move away, unless you're a big downloader like me, in which case you get the distinct impression that you're about as wecome as a fart is a space suit.

My advice would be to avoid them like the plague. There are plenty of faster, better services on the 'Net, and the benefits offered by Tiscali's pricing, already moot due to their imposed limits and the fact that others ISPs are now cheaper, are easily outweighed by their complete lack of respect for their users, their false marketing, their sub-par service and their vague, underhanded strategies.

Just for the record, and to draw this sory tale to a close, it's now the evening of Wednesday the 26th of January, and I'm no further on than when I started 7 days ago. I have just attempted to perform a speed test but the connecton keeps stalling and won't let it complete. It's certainly under 1K/sec. My last email from customer support, which arrived yesterday after me prompting them once more, asked "Are your slow speeds 24hours a day or during peak times?", the exact same question they asked me a week ago! So you see I'm weeing into the wind in every sense of the phrase.

In the interest of fairness, I sent the link to this article over to Tiscali before publishing and offered them the opportunity to comment on, or dispute, any of the points I've raised and (surprise surprise), have recieved no reply yet. Were they to have asked me to convey their commitment to expanding the network, appologised for their lamentable performance, explained that they're currently ploughing thousands into improvements and see this as a temporary blip, then I would gladly have included that info in this article. Should they manage to get something to me I will include it here with no hesitation.

I have also asked for confirmation of my bandwidth usage over the past 6 months so I can verify my estimated 5GB/week and see if they are justified in claiming I have contravened their "fair use" policy. They have so far failed to supply this to me also.

I also have also asked several questions relating to their contention ratios, pricing policies, line release procedures and officialy imposed "Unlimited Account" download limits and have so far received no reply.

Just to fend off some of the flaming and hate mail this is certain to generate from people who think I should "shut up and accept what I'm given", let me point out, in as humble a way as I possibly can, that I'm not a kid. I've been in computers and computer-related industries for 25 years. I'm not some know-it-all that thinks I have a right to stamp my feet and spit the dummy every time I think I'm being wronged. I'm not naive enough to expect perfection, or indeed anything close to perfection. I anticipate outages, planned and unplanned. I budget for rough patches and lapses in service standards, I don't however accept that the levels of service being afforded to Tiscali users are even close to being acceptable when things go wrong. In an industry not entirely famed for setting levels of excellence in customer care and after-sales-service, Tiscali stand head and shoulders above the rest as a prime example of how not to run a business.

To make matters worse, it seems they're now combining their need to implement significant spending cuts in the UK with a new advertising campaign designed to ensnare yet more users (SEE HERE). Notice they're also still advertising an "Unlimited" service. To me this borders on fraud and somebody should stop them in their tracks before yet another legion of poor suckers get drawn in.

My account has now been cancelled, and despite the hardship of having to travel to use an alternative connection to update the site for a while, it will ultimately be worthwhile. And before you all go reaching for your keyboards to tell me how biased this article was, you're damned right! Go back and read the facts. This isn't me feeling sorry for myself over some minor, insignificant examples of bad service, this is a first hand account created to inform potential users about some of the rather questionable tactics being used by Tiscali to acquire, and then falsely hold on to new users through the lack of a migration facility and the imposing of a 12 month contract. Nothing more, nothing less.

Have you had problems with Tiscali or Tiscali customer services? we'd love to hear about it and share it with the online community. Just email your comment to me (Wayne Brooker) on wayne@3dvelocity.com

28/01/05 Update:

Speeds remain sub-1K and though they've agreed to cancel my account I still, await the date as requested.

On the plus side, I just had my first adult conversation with anybody at Tiscali thanks to Jody Haskayne in their media centre. While nothing has changed so far, she has at least agreed to liase and try to find out where the breakdown in communication is happening and why things remain unresolved. A small gesture but one I appreciate, and would have since the start of this debacle.

If Tiscali want to impose download limits, no matter how large or small, they should have the balls to come out and state them insted of relying on this "if we feel your usage is impeding our network" crap! If they want people to stick to under 15GB per month, then for God's sake just say that, and let people decide if this is enough or if they should go elsewhere.

On the matter of pricing, Jody put forward the argument that many contracts, mobile phones for instance, have a contract price that's in place for the duration of that contract. My argument here is that because Tiscali do let you manually change to the new price, their prices aren't fixed for the term and should therefor be reduced automatically. If this isn't possible, users should be informed of the price cut and advised to head over to the site and change them manually themselves.

Claiming that they are instead offering a free upgrade doesn't cut it I'm afraid, partly because the upgrade has come long after the price cuts took place, and partly because the "free upgrade" comes off the back of changes to the way BT charges ISPs for its network. This isn't some Tiscali-funded act of massive generosity as many people seem to think, though in fairness they could have pocketed the cash and kept quiet. Then again, in many cases that's pretty much what they have done anyway!

Nothing is resolved, yet the fact that I spoke to somebody who actually seemed interested has made a difference. Lessons to be learned there?

31/01/05 Update:

Speeds remain sub 1K despite the fact I'm now almost 2 weeks in to the problem. I have at last got them to tell me when the account will officially be cancelled, well kind of. Their reply states that the "cancellation process takes between 10 and 15 days. This is due to the work required by BT to remove any markers from the line. You can contact me in 5 days should you require to confirm that the order is with BT."

They have managed to shut down my email address despite my insisting this stay live until the connection is closed:

Of course it's far more likely they've just screwed something up again, or oversubscribed to their mail server ;o)

04/02/05 Update:

Well, it seems at last we're getting somewhere. Too late for me (I've cancelled the account) and the other poor souls already sucked in under false pretences, but Tiscali are now at least conceding their practises were dishonest and beginning to clean up their act.

After receiving an email yesterday from a reader informing me about the involvement of trading standards, the advertising standards agency and a government run organisation called Consumer Direct, Tiscali have now posted the following announcement:

Fair Usage Policy
Consumer broadband is a contended (shared) service, with an accepted industry standard of up to 50:1. Tiscali maintains a contention ratio of less than 25:1 and has trigger levels to routinely upgrade its network well in advance of full capacity.

In common with other ISPs, Tiscali has a small group of extremely heavy users whose use is likely affect the speed of service experienced by other customers, particularly at peak times.

The data speaks for itself: the average Tiscali broadband customer uses 1Gb a month. A small group of less than 1% of our customers however, use between 30-150GB per month: up to150x average use. This 1% of customers account for 30% of all bandwidth consumed.

Tiscali has a duty to its other customers to address this issue, as if left unchecked, it would mean that either the service degrades for 99% of customers, or everyone’s monthly charge has to increase to pay for the exceptional consumption of these very heavy users.

Tiscali therefore operates a fair usage policy. This means that we segregate and place together heavy users to oblige them to share a 25:1 contented service. This is more than adequate for normal users (the other 99% of our customers). Any reduced level of service is due their collective exceptionally high use. We believe this is necessary to safeguard the experience of other users. At the same time we have served these customers with notice of termination of contract (as set out in the Terms and Conditions that they agreed to). These customers have been given the option of immediate cancellation with no penalty if they are still in contract.

We have taken steps to make our Fair Usage Policy very explicit to new customers:

- Our terms and conditions have been re-written in plain English.

- We have put an explicit link headed ‘Fair Usage Policy’ on our Broadband Product pages, which links directly to the relevant clause of the Terms and Conditions.

- Our Terms and Conditions will be updated by 7th February to make it explicit that customers who use more than 30GB per month may be affected by Tiscali’s Fair Usage Policy.

Any customers concerned that this may apply to them, should routinely check the View Usage section of the My Account area on the Tiscali website, which gives a detailed breakdown of a customer’s individual usage.

Since January 4th this year we have promoted a range of Tiscali broadband services as 'Unlimited' in order to make it clear that there is a single flat fee payable with no additional charges. The aim is to clearly differentiate this from our new £15.99 1 Mbps service, for which usage above a 2Gb cap is chargeable. To avoid any potential misrepresentation of the term ‘Unlimited’ we will cease to use it in our promotion of the products from 7th February.

Whether this article and the fuss I made was in any way responsible for the change or whether it's pure coincidence is kind of irrelevant, I'm just thrilled that Tiscali have decided to (or have been made to) play fair and declare their limitations up front, the way any honest organization should. It seems a shame so many people have had to argue so bitterly to get Tiscali to listen to them but that's another issue entirely. At least now people can decide if they like what they see before they join rather than being promised cake then fed crusts.

It seems Tiscali are also letting some users cancel their connections before the contract term is up, something which seems fair considering they so glibbly changed them without informing anyone to begin with.

This is all great news, though I really suspect we haven't quite heard the last of Tiscali yet. Here's hoping I'm wrong!

13/02/05 Update:

Currently I'm waiting for BT to action my new account, which is with Demon if anybody cares. Just to prove an adult conversation counts for nothing, I never did hear back from Jody Haskayne who'd promised to ring me the following Monday to clear up some of the factually incorrect information she'd quoted in her email. Things like claiming Tiscali had terminated my contract under clause 5.9 when in fact I'd actually cancelled it myself BECAUSE of clause 5.9. Either way, despite sounding very astute and on the ball, she then went and dropped the ball. At least they're consistent!

Nor have their legal department been in touch despite my being told this article was being referred to them. I should let them know right here that I don't accept phone calls from Tiscali. If they have an issue with the level of abuse I offer them it must be in the form of an email :)

Although I applaud the inclusion of details on the newly introduced 30GB/month cap, 15GB more than they "officially" told me was allowed under their arbitrary limitations, it has been mentioned by several people that they don't make it quite as clear as they do with their cheaper 2GB service. It'd be nice to see it displayed in a slightly bolder position but I guess we can't expect too much too quickly.

Finally, I keep reading how anyone who is using a computer for "legitimate" reasons will never hit an imposed limit of 15GB/Month or above. Well, let me tell you how wrong you could be. Transferring digital still and video images takes large ammounts of bandwidth. VOIP or video conferencing also pile on the requirements. Music and video trailers, (legal) file sharing and FTP access, running a website, watching streaming media (online TV etc.) or listening to international radio boadcasts and more all push up the requirements. Besides which, when folk pay good money for an "unlimited" service, it should be for them to decide how they use it. Sure, your average user may be perfectly happy with 30GB/month, though I'd probably question why they're paying Tiscali's inflated prices if they don't need the theoretical benefits of an unlimited service. Tiscali may seem cheap when they impose no limits, but for anj ISP now offering under 30GB/month they're looking decidedly costly.

30/03/05 Update:

Well, like some kind of infected, festering sore it seems I can't shake these people off. Today I recieved a bill from them for £12.13. It claims to be a reminder (in red) though in true Tiscali style I never recieved the initial demand, not that I'd have paid that one either.

It seems this is something to do with the fact that they take payments in arrears, so this is owed for the final period when I was having all the problems. You've got to admire their nerve!

It's now filed under "B", for "Bin".

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