They say "unlimited" 8mbit/s broadband on their webpage. Who is going to take a bet with me that it ends up having some irritating, vaguely defined (un)fair use policy on it and annoying away their customers?

Nice to see they researched a good ISP to resell...

</sarcasm>

I hope for their users sake that they get better support than the rest of us do from Tiscali.

... before they're either bought out or, more than likely, go Tango Uniform.

Cynical? Me? Naaah ....

Good luck with this venture however they will be no different than the other ISP's out there.

Because they buy wholesale from Tiscali they will still be affected by the contention on Tiscali's IPstream centrals and will experience their very poor backend Technical Support thus being unable to offer good turn around on faults!

Tiscali market their wholesale network in a way that you think it is separate from their god awful retail network however in practice on countless occasions we used to experience high latency and ping times just about the time people started getting home from work even though our 100Mbit L2TP circuit was at 40% usage.

Their datastream network is better however dealing with their Provisioning department (based in India) and their Technical Support was painful.

Good luck Jungle247 but I can't see you offering any better quality product with Tiscali as your network provider.

I've been expecting this. I suspect, now the wholesale market has opened up it's possible to run the network at fairly little cost per customer, and the broadband market has hence commoditised.

So to differentiate it's now necessary to do something a bit different.

One way to do this. is to compete on customer service. Make your customers happy. Or at least tell them you're doing so.

The other way, that I expect to see more of, is to bundle more complete solutions with the network - running business applications, probably as hosted solutions. Add a bit of voip and video conferencing, perhaps some consulting, or desktop services. You can probably start giving away the network for free, Why do small businesses want this? Single point of contact. Consolidated billing. Fully outsourced IT.

So I reckon, rather than seeing them disappear in 6 months, we will see more combined ISP/ASPs appearing on the market. BT do this already, with Hosted Exchange etc; they're adding a bit of mobile with their Fusion voip+gsm product.

So the market isn't decaying, It's just that the value proposition is changing.