I'm one of the new customers this year, and it's diabolical.

I'm on the verge of using the trade descriptions act "unfit for purpose" clause to get out of my 12 month contract.

Tiscali have serious network problems, the forums are full of people suffering.

The common theme seems to be bandwidth. From what I can deduce, Tiscali are adding far too many people to an already congested network, and then packet shaping many services into oblivion. If you only browse the web, you'll probably be alright. If you dare to use anything else, voip, multiplayer game etc, good luck.

As for peer to peer, forget it. It took me 5 days to torrent down one debian DVD image... And they call that a 2 meg connection.

I have been a happy Pipex customer for years, most unhappy customers seem to be the ones who joined after they decided to try and offer combined services.My point is that the way things are going eventually there will be no such thing as a 'pure' ISP and it will become harder to find access that isnt subject to shaping etc.

If this is how the net is going to evolve then maybe its time to get out, I dont want the Internet to be a 'shopping mall' sanitised experience with security guards telling me I cant do something/go somewhere because of an ISP policy.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted ...

I too was once a happy Pipex customer, but no longer. Over the past 12 months I have had numerous connection problems, been unable to contact customer services, no problems listed on the website and have just received a letter explaining that they are very sorry but due to an error with their billing system, I now owe them over £160 for 8 months unbilled service. Why did it take them 8 months to inform me that they hadn't been paid? When I asked the credit control team this question, their response was 'it is up to the customer to check if payment has been made'. I rarely check my bank statements, silly i know but surely I should be able to think my bills are being paid when I have set up automatic payments. As you can imagine, i was not very happy and have now cancelled my service with them and will manage with dial up until I subscribe to a new provider.

Tiscali in richmond, surrey is ok - my mate regularly dl's many vids and albums, no probs..

goto http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/ for more chatter, but **first** note what part of the country they are complaining about!!

The big blame has to be on the companies rushing into 3-play or more, thinking only of the advantage over the other company, and forgetting what the customer wants!!

Bad organisation by some local offices of some companies, and the usual slow practice of BT does not help either!!

The next person to blame is the idiots that want **everything** for almost nothing, basically a *massive* road-hog of the internet!! It is their utter greediness, that forces companies to limit, making it bad for normal surfers, and also straining already stretched resources due to lack of money put in, due to forced low prices!!!

The only real answer for companies, is to provide a *montly contract* so the people can decide for themselves!