Tiscali Broadband - avoid it!

It can take over an hour to connect to the Internet during peak times - any time from 5 pm onwards. When you turn on your PC you have to wait first of all for their modem to synchronise with their ADSL network. This in itself can take a few minutes, then you dial up to connect. And that's where the problems start.

Tiscali is keen to sign up new users, but in the process seems to have forgotten that more users means heavier traffic. So at peak times their system just can't cope - you can sit there for over an hour dialling and redialling without getting on to the Net. As I write this I had my computer on automatic redial for 65 minutes before finally getting connected. If you are at home all day the problem may not be so great - you can get connected early in the morning and stay on the Net (assuming Tiscali doesn't disconnect you, which can happen). But many people don't want to leave their PC on for hours when they're out - for safety or economic reasons - and if you get back from work tired the last thing you want to do is sit there for ages dialling over and over again just to pick up a few e-mails. In any case, even if you do try to leave it on all the time there are times you have to restart your PC - such as after downloading the latest Windows updates.

Needless to say I took this up with the support staff, but that too is a nightmare. You can wait up to 20 minutes on hold before speaking to anyone, and sometimes the line is permanently engaged. Tiscali have tried to provide support on the cheap - and hence employ people in a distant part of the world where labour is cheap. The result is that many of their so-called support staff barely speak English, and much time can be wasted merely trying to get them to understand your problem. I do not mean this in any prejudicial or derogatory manner - I speak Czech quite well but would never expect to be employed on a telephone helpline for native Czechs, as I don't speak it well enough. Tiscali's cutting corners means that although they try hard, these staff are not often not qualified to help beyond offering the most basic suggestions such as reinstalling the software or rebooting your PC. There is an e-mail link on Tiscali's website but all the e-mails I sent regarding the connection problem have gone unanswered. I would perhaps have been more tolerant of the connectivity problem if someone had told me confidently "Yes, we're having problems, we're working on them and they will be fixed by such-and-such a date." Instead the most helpful answer I've had is a suggestion that I avoid busy times!

Even trying to cancel the service is a hassle. You can't cancel by phone, so you have to write or e-mail - with Tiscali a slow way to communicate. You get 14 days grace after activation, following which you are contracted for 12 months. After 6 evenings without getting on the Net out of the 7 days I had the package I'd had enough. After bombarding Tiscali with e-mails I eventually managed to cancel my contract with them and am now with BT [see note below].

I don't like ranting like this (honest!). I spent two years using Tiscali's 56 K dial-up and generally found that service to be reliable. But I hope this little jeremiad will persuade those looking for a Broadband service that in my opinion (and that of others too - there are plenty of similar complaints on relevant discussion forums) Tiscali's broadband service, though cheap, is just not worth it.

Note: I wrote this article in 2004 and at the time I was very impressed with BT. The service offered fast speeds, was extremely reliable and the technical support was British-based and very helpful. Now, at the start of 2008, I have to say that I can't recommend them with anything like as much enthusiasm. There has been a gradual deterioration in connection speed, disconnections are annoyingly frequent and despite promises to the contrary, technical support has been farmed out to the dreaded foreign call centre. In fairness, the support staff are much more clued up and helpful than Tiscali's, but there still exists the inherent problem of understanding and being understood. Recently the connection was down for a whole afternoon and I found that I was able to connect using a false password, which is surely a security worry. In addition BT charge a lot of money for their Broadband service. They are by no means as hopeless as Tiscali but I would suggest that other ISPs may offer a better service. It is sad for Britain that the Czech Telecom connection I use in Prague maintains an average speed of 3 Mb/s and has had one outage of 30 minutes in the two years I have been using it, and apparently a speed of 10 Mb/s is standard in Scandinavia, whereas here in Britain we often get speeds little faster than an old dial-up connection and reliability is so poor.