Tiscali / TalkTalk Broadband - any good ??

topdude

I am currently with Onetel, very reliable and fast but paying £39.99 + line rental.
Anyone have opinions on Tiscali or TalkTalk, they are unbeatable on price but are they any good ?
Any comments welcomed. Thanks.

z000m

i use talktalk theyre ok nothing special though

richardast

After getting sick of pi55poor service from NTL I switched back to BT, who actually turned out to be worse.

I went to Tiscali about a year ago and so far so good. Unlike the others, I haven't heard a huge swell of public opinion against them.

azzerb

Tiscali were good when we were with them. However, finished with them about 6months ago, and every month we have to ring them up and tell them that we cancled as they keep trying to bill us. Even though they know they're not giving us a service as we used a MAC code to swap quickly. So there is no way they could give us any service, they still do it, argue on the phone for 30mins, then give us a refund...

I'd go for Virgin media truthfully, they do really good deals on Phone + Broadband + TV all in one go.

z000m

when my talktalk contract is up ill probably take a look at the sky or virgin offers, seem pretty good

fidbod

If you are only looking for broadband I would absolutely recommend ADSL24. Never heard of them before they were recommended to me but broadband is alway top quality and the customer service cannot be beaten.

pedylan

Talk Talk are cheap - we typically pay £30 a month inc line rental and any call charges outside the eve/weekend plan. That'd save you a couple of hunderd £ a year at least.

Initially Talk talk were a well publicised disaster. I've found them OK.

They'll sell you a wireless router (as opposed to free wired job) and then you'll find that you have to pay the Geek squad £25 to set it up (subsidiary Carphone Warehouse co.) I did find a forum work around but I thought that was robbery.

If you want completely trouble free telephony, pay more I suspect.

oldwelshman

Well my mum pays £22/month on talk talk and for that she gets adsl, line rental, free land line calls to home numbers any time and unlimited international calls !!!
Can't work out how they can make any money
The only issue is that it is expensive to call their helplines and you dont always get good response but she is lucky I work in IT and telecomms
I have Nildram at home and thjeir adsl is not reliable as I found my mum's to be with respect to line disconnections so can't really complain about talk talk.

on the road

You should avoid tiscali like the plague :evil:

Talk about moving the goalposts :roll:

It's not just me.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/censu ... itemid=260

redvee

There is an article in this weeks issue of micromart about good points of being with tiscali. I'm with Virginmedia and for £20 I get 2mb BB on proper fibreoptic cable, not copper phone lines, and 300 mins and 300 text on my mobile. They do cap you if you go silly on the downloads during peak times, 4-9pm, but all they do is slow your DL speed. No complaints here.

azzerb

redvee wrote:

There is an article in this weeks issue of micromart about good points of being with tiscali. I'm with Virginmedia and for £20 I get 2mb BB on proper fibreoptic cable, not copper phone lines, and 300 mins and 300 text on my mobile. They do cap you if you go silly on the downloads during peak times, 4-9pm, but all they do is slow your DL speed. No complaints here.

Ahhh, that reminds me why we left Tiscali, apparently in their fair use policy, we use too much internet... The fair use policy is a rip off, we pay for unlimited internet, and most of the major downloads were never done during peak hours. :?

Yet, on Virgin and BT we never had this trouble...

fluff.

azzerb wrote:

Ahhh, that reminds me why we left Tiscali, apparently in their fair use policy, we use too much internet... The fair use policy is a rip off, we pay for unlimited internet, and most of the major downloads were never done during peak hours. :?

Had this with Tiscali too, they said my usage was high (20-25 gig a month, nothing like high imo) and recommended I go on their super duper not quite as limited 8 meg package for close to 30 quid a month. I told them to shove it, and am now on bethere for 19 quid a month connecting at 17meg with a more friendly fair usage policy.

Mark Alexander

You get what you pay for. your ISP may be fine but as soon as you have a problem you find out how useless many are. A lack of understanding and advised to "Just ring BT" when it is not your job. :evil: You pay your bills to them. It's their service that's off. It's their responsibility and Only they can do it.

Edwinsprint

Currently planning to leave Tiscali but I have heard of them playing all sorts of games to stop you swapping.

In the last few months I keep being unable to get online. It says that Username/password cannot be verified. But then 1hr later I try again and all is okay...

Completely crap.

I have heard that Vodafone is good. £25 for all calls including day and broadband.

Dont do Tiscali .Idiots for customer service. Chimps could do better

jdp

We signed up to Tiscali phone and broadband package.

Had massive problems with connection when with Tiscali, it kept dropping out and after a month they gave us a MAC code and didn't charge disconnection.

Then found they'd never changed our phone line over so we'd been paying for line rental when they weren't providing it! They're sill sending us bills but i'm refusing to pay, they're a nightmare. As a result our line was disconnected and I had to pay £100 for a new line/number :evil: :shock:

The other problem with them is useless support staff who I struggled to understand at the best of times and seem unable to deviate from their q + a lists and problem solvers

Signed up to Plusnet and they've been brilliant. Staff are very helpful, no long waits to speak to someone and a very reliable connection

Avoid Tiscali!!! :evil:

Mark Alexander

To be fair, When it's a technical problem/fault, your ISP is just a go-between and are simply office based with absolutely no technical knowlege.

Random Vince

i've not had problems with talk talk, it was cheap and easy to set up, even when i supplied my own router.

the problem they did have, was they spread too fast onto the market, launching them selves quite vigorously and trying to connect too many people in too shorter space of time.

they seem to have sorted this out now.

cee

at the end of the day, its all going to depend on 2 things.

1 how close you are to the exchange.
2 how many other users contend with you.

Broadband speeds are advertised remember as 'up to', including the superduper 24mbit packages.

its going to be slightly different for every household. ONe thing that should be the same across the board is the customer service though. so thats nice and easy to check. others have posted recomendation for/against particular isps here.

I am with Virgin media. I get the 20Mbit XL package for 37 pounds a month. I could get it cheaper as part of a deal, but i think their service sucks so don't trust them with my phone connection which I still get from BT. (maybe i am not taking advantage but i just prefer them to be separate)

I would never recommend Virgin for their customer service, but if you are in one of their cabled areas, the quality of the broadband service is in my opinion second to none. (i just think the fibre technology is better than adsl2)

Random Vince

thats true, my upto 8 mb connection (but for £10 per month more you could have 16mb sir" is infact only upto 6mb due to the local phone exchange only being able to handle 6mb maximum

i'm guessing my connection is lower than 6mb on average

i would not recommend virgin for anything at all, i've had many threatening letters from them for late payment (it was a direct debit, how can it be late?)

i got bored (and wanted booting off the service so i didnt have to pay my way out of the contract) and canceled the direct debit on 3 occasions

1, a month with no service, so i decided i wasn't going to pay for a month since i'd payed for a service which wasn't provided so i must have payed a month in advance for the following month when it did work.

2, retaliation at being told i was going to get charged for late payment despite it being on a direct debit - obviously they can't cope with using direct debit so i'll save them the bother

3, telling me i'd breached the terms and conditions and was using it for business use and pornographic media - claimed this was a slur on my good character and wanted an appology.

oldwelshman

redvee wrote:

There is an article in this weeks issue of micromart about good points of being with tiscali. I'm with Virginmedia and for £20 I get 2mb BB on proper fibreoptic cable, not copper phone lines, and 300 mins and 300 text on my mobile. They do cap you if you go silly on the downloads during peak times, 4-9pm, but all they do is slow your DL speed. No complaints here.

So whats the point in having fibre optic if your limited to 2mb? You can get faster on copper if close enough to exchange.
No point in having fibre unless you can get Gigabit !!

redvee

oldwelshman wrote:

redvee wrote:

There is an article in this weeks issue of micromart about good points of being with tiscali. I'm with Virginmedia and for £20 I get 2mb BB on proper fibreoptic cable, not copper phone lines, and 300 mins and 300 text on my mobile. They do cap you if you go silly on the downloads during peak times, 4-9pm, but all they do is slow your DL speed. No complaints here.

So whats the point in having fibre optic if your limited to 2mb? You can get faster on copper if close enough to exchange.
No point in having fibre unless you can get Gigabit !!

Price. My income is everybody's taxes. When I get a job then I'll up my BB speed.

SteveBowen

I'm with onetel, which by the way is owned by TalkTalk, I pay £30.50 per month which includes 2mb broadband,all landline calls inc Europe, USA and Australia and line rental.
You should be able to get the price down a bit.
Hope this helps.

Mark Alexander

speed also depends on the quality of your line. that is something you can't do anything about.

cee

oldwelshman wrote:

redvee wrote:

There is an article in this weeks issue of micromart about good points of being with tiscali. I'm with Virginmedia and for £20 I get 2mb BB on proper fibreoptic cable, not copper phone lines, and 300 mins and 300 text on my mobile. They do cap you if you go silly on the downloads during peak times, 4-9pm, but all they do is slow your DL speed. No complaints here.

So whats the point in having fibre optic if your limited to 2mb? You can get faster on copper if close enough to exchange.
No point in having fibre unless you can get Gigabit !!

ahhhh that sounds like what we want.....

the cable service provides a more solid connection than the adsl..... i literally get 20Mbit downloads. unlike others i have seen on adsl 24Mbit getting closer to 16.

Also, it doesn't seem to slow down at 'peak' times of the day as it can with adsl

gkerr4

i;m with Virgin media - have been with them as Telewest since april 2000 and have had their broadband offering since... - well whenever they introduced broadband services (2002maybe?)

I reckon I could count on one hand the number of times it has went down for any period of time - i honestly can't remember the last outage and I have never had to call customer services about the broadband service* - it is great.

We get the odd time when we have to go and re-boot the router thing, but these are pretty few and far between too.


I have always paid £25 but it was increased from 512k up to the 10Mb we have now - and this is a tru 10Mb downstream - awesome


(* I do have to call them often about the TV service though - which is a different story)

Mark Alexander

My router has ben connected for about a year without a single drop

markyboy2005

I pay about 50 quid a month for a 0.5M connection that drops very very often.........think yourselves lucky

topdude

Thanks for all your replies, looks like an emotive subject. I am keen on reducing my monthly cost but not if it causes more problems as Onetel works fine.
Have to think carefully about this one !!