Tiscali: Cheap and crap

I’ll admit it, I’m cheap when it comes to telecommunication. I generally look for the line rental refund when renewing my mobile and I hate paying line rental to BT. Two years ago I moved house, outside the area cabled by Blueyonder, who were great. First I tried Orange broadband, which was free with my mobile phone. It was slow and the supplied router was a bit flaky. Last year I jumped ship to T-Mobile, £20/month covered line rental and 1 Mbit broadband - bargain! Setup was a hassle, they took several weeks to activate the line, but once it worked I was content. In October they started faking DNS results, to stick advertising in place of the browser’s error page. In January they ‘upgraded’ many users to ‘ADSL Max, upto 8 Mbit.’ Thats when the real trouble started, widespread throttling and intermittent connections have since been the norm. The tiscali support forum is flooded with faults and complaints. The 0870 support line is congested and useless, it’s just clueless Indians parroting their scripts: reboot, reset the router, retry, engineers are working on the problem, wait 24 hours etc. Meanwhile the tiscali status page reports all is well, 100% service. Time to jump ship again. Thank heck for Web n Walk. A useful post, to make up for this rant, will shortly follow.