Tiscali Throttling Brings Customers To A Crawl

[GhostShip]

Recently it seems Tiscali are abusing their customers so heavily that even non p2p users are being denied service.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/21/tiscali_itunes_blocked/

Tiscali has been forced to reverse a software installation on its bandwidth-throttling hardware, after it triggered complaints from customers who saw iTunes blocked during peak hours and other traffic slowed to a crawl.
Engineers have now rolled back the installation, so access should be returned to normal during this evening's "traffic management" period, a spokeswoman said.

Over the last week users have reported newly-blocked ports and sub-dial-up speeds of 10Kbit/s between 5pm and 9pm.
The firm tweaked its opaque fair use policies last week via an upgrade to its Cisco kit. Complaints quickly rose as it hit speeds and blocked access.
The sudden deterioration of service brought howls of derision in Tiscali user forums. The majority of current discussions have headings like "painfully slow speeds" and "web ok, anything else = fail". Peer-to-peer, newsgroup and usenet traffic has also been affected.

As well as having an impact on gaming, this issue is a cause of peak time slow speeds and is currently affecting: iTunes access, VPN/FTP/RDP just to mention a few.

This ISP is one of those throttling so heavily that its impossible to run winmx at certain times for many, my advice is jump ship folks, fair use is fair use but denial of service is totally unreasonable and wrong. 
Even after promising customers affected that some sort of fix was in place to restore some sort of service it seems Tiscali even got that wrong.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/22/tiscali_bandwith_problems_ongoing/

Tiscali's attempts to restore anything close to reasonable internet service for its customers following a botched software upgrade have failed.
We reported on Monday how some of the most popular internet applications including iTunes, online gaming, and peer-to-peer are unavailable or effectively useless for swathes of Tiscali customers.
Normal service hasn't been resumed however. The evening logjam was repeated yesterday.

Many Pipex customers have who had not realised their line had been migrated to the Tiscali network have cried foul after having no problems under the old regime.
Tiscali paid £210m for the Pipex broadband customer base last year. There's growing disquiet among the new members that they still pay Pipex prices for cheaper, apparently shoddier Tiscali service via its LLU network.

Its clear in the ISP business that there is no such thing as a "free lunch" but with an ISP like Tiscali its more than clear there no such thing as even a normal service, for those still not contacting Tiscali to cancel their "service" (or lack of it ) please remember the help folks here can work some miracles but fixing this problem is not one of them.

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Many Pipex customers have who had not realised their line had been migrated to the Tiscali network have cried foul after having no problems under the old regime.

Pipex have been almost as bad for the last two years anyway and getting steadily worse that's why a lot of people didn't realise because pipex was as crappy as tiscali by the time they merged.

Pipex are nothing but robbing thieves.... something myself and the customer support almost agreed on when they agreed to mutually terminate my service with no extra charges.... Btw they still owe me over a hundred quid a year on for overcharging.... something i doubt i will ever see  paid out in my  lifetime.... funny thing was that tiscali also merged with bulldog the next isp i tried & after a lot of heated phone calls also agreed to terminate with no penalty to myself...... morel is dont take there crap lying down because they will walk all over you if you do....... piss them off enough they always terminate without penalty especially when you are complaining about paying for a service that they cant provide once you sign up with them.