They own that crapfest as well. It will be most interesting to see if customer service improves under Vodaphone. If I hadn't successfully gotten out of my contract with them it would be something to hope for!

I have been waiting (impatiently), for an upgrade for over 2 months being passed around various departments with no one giving me a satisfactory answer as to why it is taking so long... Certainly sounds like it is time to jump ship... My partner has had a Vodafone mobile in the past and the customer service she got when she had problems was worse than useless. Sounds like a match made in heaven.

From what was once a very capable Pipex circa 2003 (when I joined), and earlier, its certainly sad to see the way things are going...

Any recommends for a broadband ISP?

Ta

Dan

Are Vodaphone going to sign up / be in talks with / looking with interest with, Phorm?

The service can't get any worse, after all. It *might* even get better!

... without any problems, awesome speeds and no caps etc... hope this doesn't bugger it all up!

I've been with an outfit called Be for the last 18 months; they're unbundled and provide ADSL2+. I get 12 Mb/s @ 1 Mile of copper from exchange (it's actually only 1/4 mile as the crow flies, but what can you do?) for £17/month.

>Any recommends for a broadband ISP?

ADSL24 are arguably giving the best bang for buck at the moment. The speed drops during off-peak hours (10pm to 8am) when everyone hits the torrents, but I've never seen it go below 4M or so.

Paris, because she knows all about getting the best bang for buck.

Vodafone bought an irish based triple play player a few weeks ago called perlico

Obviously they have decided they should have a go at the rest of europe

ironically perlico used to use 100% irish owned and managed as a selling slogan...

I have used Be* (www.bethere.co.uk) for 6 months with very few problems and their tech support is reasonable and free from a BT line.

I suspect not much will change once it is vodafone ownership. The company is too big to change overnight, it might happen over a long period of time

I'd question the strategy here....Vodafone is a PREMIUM brand with PREMIUM pricing and a good service, excellent coverage.

Tiscali, is a cheap skate false economy brand with shit service, poor customer support and poor everything.

I'd expect some rising prices, and some serious investment in infrastructure. The problem is is that it may alienate some of the subscriber base with the price increases, and price increases are unlikely for some time due to contracts.

Unless they hardcore invest in unbundling with their oodles of cash.

Doesnt O2 own Be?

"Buying Tiscali would leapfrog Vodafone into fourth in the overall broadband market, and first among mobile operators that offer fixed line internet access."

Btw, I work for Vodafone, don't ask for a timescale on fix - we wont give you one and if we do we are lying because we haven't been given one. On the flip side of this deal however Vodafone do offer the full HSDPA b/w where O2 have only been providing it to their 'preffered' clients on business accounts... maybe big changes are a foot for broadband users? I left Tipex after pipex bought out F2S, best thing I ever did ... R.I.P the real F2S. http://www.adsl24.co.uk/ is who I'm with now and I've had pretty shit hot service tbh... I feel unclean now :( (more so than usual) I have an O2 contract for a 3 year old XDAII.

It's weird, I wouldnt even get a staff contract with Vodafone -- yet my experience with O2 customer service has not exactly been fantastic either. 3 have moved all their customer service overseas, T-mobile suck, Virgin and ASDA run off VF infrastructure .. and in some parts of the UK VF is the only company that offers half decent reception. Vodafone has the best brand recognition overseas -- wtf does it suck so much over here?

I've been with Pipex for over five years and they were rock solid - and great service too. You did pay a bit more but hey, you get what you pay for.

And then Tiscali crashed the party. My service now has the turn of speed of a tortoise wading in porridge and drops more often than an England fielder. And yet I'm still paying the same price as before - more fool me. Will be moving to anyone who can offer a decent connection as soon as possible.

Flames as it's what I wish to apply to the trousers of the idjits at Tiscali for sabotaging my perfectly good connection.

Their FUP is certainly very unspecific about how you breach their policy. There's information here that suggests unlimited means 40GB and if so, that's a damn site worse than Tiscali's policy where unlimited means unlimited (outside of certain hours).

.... Especially 'cos I bailed from Pipex when they sold out to Tiscali...

... I'm now very happy with my 24meg/sec (ok ok - actually only 20 'cos of the distance to the exchange) with no traffic shaping / cap etc etc...

:-)

Considering it took Travesti three months, two failures to turn up, a 'flat tyre' and a stroppy letter to Mary Turner to get them to replace my malfunctioning Homechoice box with a Tiscali box that looks suspiciously like an old Xbox and actually seems to work less well than the old box (line rate has drpped to under a meg, for a start), I can't really see how Vodafone could do any worse unless the managing director personally came round and sh@t through my letter box.

Was with Homechoice, then they were bought by Tiscali, now looks like they're getting bought as well.

I want my upgrade so I can get Tiscali+ dammit!

.... They are the worst shower of sh1t i have ever come across from a customer service and support perspective.

good riddance.

So lets get this all in perspective:

Bulldog purchases energis - ahem or was it viceversa :)

then it looks at selling off its user base to either vodafone or pipex

Bulldog rejects vodafone and sells client base to pipex.

Pipex then sells to Tiscalli

Tiscalli now sells back to vodafone.

this is all in the period of 2 years.

These types of transactions should become illegal, since the loosers of this game are the employees and clients who get pushed around like unwanted junk.

My Bulldog connection at the exchange is plugged into equipment owned by Cable & Wireless. There's no download limit whatsoever and has a solid 14530kbps connection. C&W sold their residential customer business to Pipex with C&W becoming their wholesale provider. Tiscali then bought Pipex. Nothing has physically changed though and If I took out the Tiscali 'Pipex Pro' package now, it would still get plugged into C&W equipment.

However, if Vodaphone buy Tiscali, then they would be inheriting the LLU deal with C&W alongside their current BT reseller arrangement. I can't see that lasting for long considering the fractious relationship between local loop unbundlers and BT.

"...shit service, poor customer support and poor everything."

Same could be said for Vodafone's current Mobile Broadband offering. And their customer support teams and technical people are utterly useless.

i've had my vodafone mobile 9 years and have had no problems with they customer support or quality of service yes you pay a bit more but i can get service any where i've been in the uk short of the top of mountains in the highlands the one place i found i cant get it was in my friends house as he lived in a valley between to big hills with masts at the top and them in a went outside i could. plus when traveling for work i get a signal any where in the world or less so the extra i pay has been worth it (infact that extra came down on my last contract renewal)

so surly this can be a good thing vodafone don't muck about and if this is a market they can invest in then they will throw money at it till the serivce is good enough for people to want to change to it that means better up time and speeds

Don't tell anyone but aaisp are nice for techs.

Support is available via IRC, sms and phone, and they do IPv6, rDNS and anything else you might need.

They are also dedicated to "provide an IP connection" that means no packet fiddling

Voda was an ISP. Back in the distance past Vodafone Mobile was an ISP (very fast as it only had staff using it whilst it was tested), which then became Vizzavi and finally Vodafone Live. Also Vodafone has had a number of attempts at getting into the home phone connection market. Chris Gent dumped the ISP side when he steered the company away from anything that meant Voda owning copper in the ground.

Paris, so that Chilly will know Smut posted.

Interestingly Vodafone's WAP portal has a phorm like setting for if you want your usage tracked to serve you customised ads or not. It has 3 settings, non customised, customised using your WAP browsing history, and customised using browsing history and all other information Vodafone has on you. I disconnected at that point as I was just checking to see if WAP was as CRAP on my new phone as the last one (and it was). Lets hope they don't install the same system on any broadband they get their hands on.

The Vodafuckers, led by Wide Boy Gent, thought there was no future in fixed line services when they bought Mannesmann and tried to sell off *all* the fixed line assets including an impressive pan-European backbone. What they couldn't sell they starved - cutting back on investment and preventing takeovers. Fast-forward to 2008 and they're buying up ISP's wherever they can and reintegrating Arcor. In the meantime they lost the prestigious contract to supply (and presumably snoop upon) WiFi German trains - this is ironic because Arcor was spun out of Deutsch Bahn and owns most of the cables that run next to the train networks.

Been with Vodafone as a mobile customer for 12 years and I think they've been excellent in terms of customer service. Theyve got better everytime I've contacted them, so hopefully this maturity will absorb and not be diluted by the new services....... Fingers crossed they do a proper transformation project....

Do these guys know who pays the bills?

For what it's worth, I've never been suckered into those implausible speed deals, and I likely pay over the odds for the speed I do get, but Tiscali works.

Just don't believe anything they tell you. I wonder what the new rules on selling are going to do to some of the advertised Broadband deals?

Just got a letter from Pipex, saying they are moving me to the Pipex/Tiscali network. I need to jump ship, anyone recommend a good ISP.

I'll miss the excellent C&W network, always been very reliable for internet usage, phone is a bit rubbish

The article says the bid is likely to be around €1.6bn and an earlier comment says Tiscali have almost 1.9 million customers.

So in very very round figures, Vodafone would be paying around €1000 per customer.

Mmmm.

Must make sense to someone, but to me it looks like a hellish expensive way of acquiring a customer base.

Tell you what, give me half that and I'll be a Vodafone customer too. At least I can speel it, unlike half the western world.

I gave Tiscalli a chance, I left it six months before I left Pipex, but the throttling, useless DNS, dropped connections and slow backbone was just too much, I was paying a premium price for what had been a premium product before Tiscalli came along and changed it to a crap service for three times the price of a Tiscalli subscriber. Now I am with Be-Unlimited and would not go back, Be-unlimited are the best. No shaping, no caps. Just unlimited broadband.

Subscriber? Did I say subscriber? Your not now though are you, your just a commodity to be bought and sold.

I made the mistake getting Toucan (Tiscalli) and got out with no charge because of appaling speeds...sub modem at times. If VF use the same traffic shaping then there will be no improvement. they need to spend buck on unbudling exchanges in rural areas and with their brand name will get more subscribers. I moved to ADSL24 and get a spot on 5-6mbs all teh time...I used to get rthe same from BT Business Broadband which is a premium service. The speed is right for my exchange/distance and I don't really need anymore speed but I wouldn't turn it down of course.

Tiscalli are just rubbish...off shore service center is a farce.....

Newnet, excellent network and tech support and they are unbundling slowly too.

It is run by networking professionals who know what they are talking about and actually listen to what you have to say when you report an issue and appreciate that you actually know your stuff too, not like the outsourced morons reading from a screen when you phone up Internet Service Providings.

Two months? I've been waiting for 2 years with Pipex. I'm in downtown Reading, paying £30 a month and getting 512K when I'm lucky.

When it comes, will it be WiMax or HSDPA?

So, did the deal happen, or was it just a rumo(u)r?

Well if they change my contract to limited I'll cancel. Since I'm still in the lock-in period this normally would be a bad thing, but they changed the contract, so that stops me having to pay a penalty.

If I can't find anyone else, I'll do without.

Just surf at work.

Who needs Phorm when Tiscali have already infected their users with Barefruit?

The only Tiscali user I have spoken to does not see being offered the 'tiscali portal' when they mistype an address as much of an issue.

If VF are already using a profiler on their WAP traffic, those in the know will only have one option. It is very sad that VF are the choice for corporate mobile deals.

Next they will be offering SpinVox and profiling the Directors and top management of every business in the land. Oh, I forgot, it is the directors who are investing in SpinVox through their asset management portfolios.

Flames: what else could solve this problem?