Like all these things it does at the end of the day depend on the individual user's experience and
expectations. People do pop up from time to time who are happy on Tiscali. Its even possible that they are getting the speed/service that they ought to get, but this forum probably expects that they are getting less than they should but don't know it!
Tiscali have a bad history when support (or even customer service) is needed. Indeed I believe they used to completely hog the
ISP Complaint Service at ispreview. Click on 2008 & 2009 on that page for an idea! They also have a history of congestion and/or throttling. As you may realise broadband sold (say) as an upto 8bps service is affected by lots of factors that reduce the speed you can actually get. Unfortunately the most common of these is either a lack of support or lack of investment by the ISP. Tiscali have a lot of history of congestion/throttling as a result of
(in effect) overselling the shared links from the exchange back to them and on to the rest of the internet. This means that even if your line did establish a full speed link then there would be times of day (for some most times) when you could not obtain that speed.
Now if a broadband package is cheap enough or the congestion/throttling infrequent enough or even controlled/predictable enough or the bandwidth allowed extreme then this can be quite acceptable. Eg. plusnet or
prior to WBC entanet.
Some ISPs will however blame the speed on your line, your cat, the phase of the moon, rather than admit to congestion (or throttling). Tiscali has often fallen into this category along with BT Retail and a few others. For reference one can think of throttling and traffic shaping as being like roundabouts and chicanes that try to balance demand against congestion in a fair and moderating way. Once it exceeds certain levels this control becomes untenable, like say the
M6 at Birmingham at 5pm on a Friday Evening.
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andrewh1973
