Tiscali

Well, Tiscali have me by the goolies, and my only comeback appears to be a plee that you don't let them do the same to you. My experience is on their 8MB ADSL service (the best service they offer).

I got an average of 2MB. This is way less than other providers on the same line.
Some e-mails took over a day to reach me. This, according to the company trying to send me mails made the comment that "Tiscali and Orange are the worst for this".
Their is no e-mail forwarding policy once you leave Tiscali, there are no bounce measures once your e-mail address is gone, and you can't keep your e-mail address. I will say that I had the same problem when leaving Telewest, however.
Within months my broadband measured around 86k during peak times and the internet continually locked up for 10 minutes at a time. This was a deliberate policy restraint which Tiscali refuse to remove and means you can't use the internet between 6PM and 11PM, not even for online gaming, checking e-bay, e-mails, etc.*
Their internet technical support took roughly ten days to respond to each e-mail (they promise you a 3 day response) and did not resolve any technical issues.
Their phone technical support are based in India, have trouble with English, and cannot resolve anything but basic "Have you plugged it in" queries. You probably know more about broadband than they do, and they can't follow up on queries, call you back, or e-mail you. On the plus side, they do pick up within 5 minutes.
The customer services sometimes replies within 10 days and sometimes not at all (they GUARANTEE you a 48 hour response).
The router they sent me had a high pitch squeal the whole time, which I had to replace with my own.

* It's worth saying more on this as it borders on the illegal, let alone unethical. After two months, I was moved over to a heavy-usage policy. THe policy doesn't describe precisely what fair usage is, but when you ask their call centres it turns out than "more than 600MB at any time during the hours of 6PM to 11PM, including browsing, e-mail, streaming radio, etc". Just as an illustration, an XBOX-360 demo will likely be more than 600MB. I do not believe that I have broken that limit and haven't since, and by contrast many other providers (such as Xen and Pipex) will allow you a fairly relaxed and free usage habit. I have wasted significant time and effort in trying to resolve this, only to have to resort to leaving them.

Get an independent email address with your own domain name. Looks better, and you never have to change it again when you change ISP.

I looked at Purple Cloud and Namesco, chose Purple Cloud. There are several others. It cost me

In reply to:

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Their is no e-mail forwarding policy once you leave Tiscali, there are no bounce measures once your e-mail address is gone, and you can't keep your e-mail address. I will say that I had the same problem when leaving Telewest, however.

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You can keep your e-mail address, I have used Tiscali dial-up since 2001. Maintain your pay-as-you-go dial-up account and it will keep your original Tiscali e-mail address live.

That's quite a good idea, I had forgotten it. Only, do you need to dial up every so often? I had to when I kept my btinternet open that way, as a backup internet connection. If you forgot to dial up it lapsed after 90 days. Like Hotmail dumps everything after 60(?).

Tiscali do not let you keep your e-mail addy when you leave.

I was with them and I tried the DU trick and they said yes we can do that, what is the name you want with your new e-mail for the DU account... by the way it cant be the same as the one you have now as that is in use.