B*@!*!! Tiscali

[RogerS]

If you value good service and reliability I think you will have to pay for it.

Andy

Well said, Andy. I get fed up reading people whingeing on about lack of service/customer service etc and when asked how much is this service costing you? £5 a month or even nothing is the reply. Says it all, really. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

 

[devonwoody]

The BBC news this morning thought AOL might be going into free broadband!

Any info?

 

[RogerS]

The BBC news this morning thought AOL might be going into free broadband!

Any info?

I put AOL in the same category as Norton....I wouldn't give 'em house room on my PC :lol:

 

[devonwoody]

Reading your mail Roger I see there was a banner advert at the bottom.

Wingonlime or was it speedonline at $12 per month, landline with 5x surfing speed. Anyone know anything on this one?
Edit
did a google search it was wingonline

http://www.wingonline.net/

was this a pop up? it is only for USA?

 

[MilkyBarKid]

I'd avoid Plusnet like the plague - you should see the flak they're getting after losing masses of e-mail. Their e-mail servers have been unreliable for about three weeks. Along with many other customers we've been watching their share prices drop with glee.

I've been without a broadband connection for nearly 4 weeks now - and calling their help lines has almost always been a one hour wait. They play a game called ticket tennis where they return your query without reading it to buy time - they've done it over and over to me. They have been utterly incompetent in managing my problems - it's taken them a total of ten days to actually book a BT engineer to come to see me (that takes another ten days).

As soon as my connection is restored - I'm getting a Mac code and I'm off to someone who can maintain basic services like e-mail reliably. It's really embarrassing because I've recommended them to loads of people.

MBK

I am not with them, but Plusnet are well regarded with a few people I know (3). I am with NTL and they are bad... When it rains, my connection (10meg)always goes off until it stops. Calling them is a total waste of time. They are based just down the road from me, but it still takes 2 weeks to get an engineer to fix anything phone/DSL/TV.

If call centres are an issue I can say for sure that Plusnet are based in City centre Sheffield. I supply all the fingerprint access control systems to the offices. The boss is a nice fella too. They appear to be very professional and have 300 staff, of which around 150 are on the end of the phones.

If I get some spare time and can face the hassle, I will get a BT line put back in and change to Plusnet. - I hate doing anything like that, you just know its going to be problem..

Lee.

 

[ike]

MBK wrote,

It's really embarrassing because I've recommended them to loads of people.

Your experience just highlights the variation in service from a particular ISP. Have all the people you recommended to, had poor service as well?

Like Syntec, I have gotten all I expected from Broadband Plus with no probs at all, although to be fair to your point about their email, I stick to Yahoo mail, but only because I'm never feeling enthusiastic enough to figure out how to set up the computer with Outlook, POP summat, etc without completely b****ing up the computah!.

Only one problem which turned out to be my router throwing a wobbly for an unknown reason, and was fixed by a power-on reset.

Is there an unbiased 'league' table of broadband ISP's that you can trust?

Enough drivel from me today...

Ike

 

[RogerS]

Only one problem which turned out to be my router throwing a wobbly for an unknown reason, and was fixed by a power-on reset.

This just goes to show how far removed I am from computers these days. When I read this post, Ike, I mentally pronounced router as in woodworking router and had a senior moment when you said you needed a power-on reset..couldn't quite understand what you were saying.....thought you were making a joke....then I realised what you really meant

 

[JPEC]

Sorry, but I have to play devil's advocate here.

I have been with Tiscali since they were called Lineone, hence my email address, probably about 8 years or so, and I have never had any problems at all, moved from dial up to broadband a couple of years ago and they have been great.
I will say I have never had to call their helpline though, so I cannot comment on that.

Hope you have better luck with your new provider Scrit.

Julian

 

[Scrit]

I will say I have never had to call their helpline though, so I cannot comment on that.

That's where all the problems lie - they are excruciatingly slow and won't call in BT until extreme pressure is applied. I have now come across another guy elsewhere who was "off-line" for more than 2 months with Tiscali when the problem eventually took a BT engineer 10 minutes to sort-out. Oh, and because the Tiscali help desk is so anally retentive I now have a fine collection of line filters (6 in total). It took them weeks to send the first one out and now they can't seem to stop!

Scrit

 

[JPEC]

Why is it that in so many businesses, customer 'service' is a thing of the past!
Thanks for the heads up, if I have any problems with them I'll know what to expect.

Julian

Ps. When I bought my Dell computer about two years ago, it was one of their double memory offers. The computer came without the extras and it took two months and 37 phone calls to sort it out. I never knew a company could have so many departments, but i'm pretty sure I spoke to someone in every one at least twice :x Luckily like you did Scrit I kept a record of every call. The computer is great but so much for customer service!!

Julian

 

[Pecker]

The BBC news this morning thought AOL might be going into free broadband!

Any info?

Woody, "www.theregister.co.uk" has various articles on AOL worth looking at.

It is unlikely AOL will off a free service, however they want to be less reliant on subscriptions and stike up more big buck deals to help fund the service such as they have just done with Google for about 1billion $.

As Isps are now charged by volume usage as opposed to the old BT flat rate, totally free broadband is now highly unlikely in the UK for any company. Believe it or not the profit per customer is VERY low, which is why Isps are jumping on very high bandwidth users and insisting they stop it or pay more.

Briefly TimeWarner who own AOL are employing Citibank to look at the whole european setup. They are shedding a few thousand jobs here and across Europe and stunningly, in America have stopped the free AOL CD discs that appear everywhere (YIPPEE!!!!!!). However contrary to recent comments, it is not top of their agenda to break up the european operation and sell it off.

AOL cannot compete with the bundled services of TV/Phone/Broadband offered by several companies now, so they have to look at cost cutting and other paying services to servive. It is quiet possible thier Members only areas will be opened up and more advertsing will also be seen

As I commented a few days ago, the UK Broadband market is in a real state of flux at the moment and a lot more changes will happen over the next 6 - 12 months.

Mark

 

[woodshavings]

I moved from Freeserve to Tiscali 2 months ago. So far, so good. I did have to call their support line when I thought I had lost service. (I hadn't, my router psu had failed - not supplied by Tiscali) The help desk was in India and the support guy was knowlegable and helpful.
The Tiscali deal was £12.99 month, unlimited, at 1Meg download speed.
John