What do people think of the new Tiscali deals out there at the moment, especially the £19.99 a month 8MB / Unlimited broadband with free UK landline calls and no line rental?

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Jason Lloyd
moneysupermarket.com
0800 298 5770

" We're here to help you find the best deal and avoid the pitfalls through sharing knowledge and experiences."

I hadn't noticed that deal but did notice in other new leaflets they have changed "unlimited" to "unlimited time online". It may be tautological but it is more accurate. They undo that good work by then employing the bait tactic (that admittedly most others use) of highlighting the introductory period price. £8 a month? Nope, it's £13.

If you are on an LLU exchange this has to be the best deal on the market. Anytime UK calls free line rental and "unlimited" 8Mb Broadband for only £19.99.

However, they have also introduced a cut down version as well - 2Mb Broadband, free weekend calls and free line rental for only £14.99. If you take off the £10.50 minimum most people pay for line rental on its own, this makes the rest of the package incredibly cheap - and in practice, 2MB is ample speed for most people (and can be a lot more stable than 8 Mb). Evening calls are only 5p for an hour, so unless you make a lot of daytime landline calls this is the one I'd go for!

I discount the "£7.99" broadband because like most companies (especially BT) this is only a temporary initial price and doesn't reflect the long term cost of the package. The long term cost of £12.99 for 1 MB with line rental on top just doesn't compare with the previous 2 offers. 

Well, I signed up for the Tiscali £19.99 deal.  Since 19th June, when it went live, I have had no broadband and a very crackly phone line.  It is now 3rd July and they still haven't sorted it.  It took over a week just to get their support people to grasp that both services were working fine until the switch to Tiscali, and that the problems were likely to be related.

 
My Father-in-Law signed up at the same time as me.  We had real difficulty getting his PC connected, eventually calling their tech support.  It turns out that you must have Windows XP or Vista on your PC to use the Tiscali broadband set up CD and their modem.  This is contrary to the advice on their website, which says anything above Windows 98 should work.

 
My Father-in-Law was immediately returned to BT by Tiscali.  I have not been so lucky.
 

I have just enquired about this deal but unfortunately the service is not available from my exchange. However, I have been offered as a temporary measure all the facilities of this package except that I will have to pay Approx £4.50 per month line rental until the service is available which has been indicated to be within thed next three months. Tiscali have also waived the £30 set up fee for this combined service

I am extremely happy with the service that Tiscali hace provided  

 

Good luck Rollerball.

 I reckon that if your service works, you'll have a good experience.  And I hope you continue to have good experiences if things go awry.

All I can tell you is that Tiscali's "High Level Complaints" team have been flagging my problems as urgent since last week, and yet my phone service has now deteriorated to the extent that outgoing calls are blocked.  All requests for assistance get a promise to call me back on my mobile with an update on what the problem is and when it will be fixed.  Yet I have not received a promised call since Friday.  It is now Wednesday 4th July.

It was only when "High Level Complaints" came on board that there were any signs of progress, as nobody else in customer support was willing or able to address my concerns.  And I only got "High Level Complaints" on board by complaining to their professional body - the ISPA.

 
ISPA are now escalating my complaint to external arbitration, as it has not been addressed in even a remotely timely manner.  Tiscali say broadband faults should be solved within 48 working hours and phone line faults should be rectified within 96 working hours.  Whilst these are weasel terms, it is now fifteen days, or more than 120 working hours down the line, even if I take Tiscali's minimum working hours of Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm, and I know that at least some of their technical staff work Saturdays.

Like I say - I reckon that if your service works, you'll be happy, but if my experience is anything to go by, Tiscali don't do Customer Support in any meaningful sense.
 

At the risk of being unduly suspicious, I find dun diggin's apparent experience surprising.

1) Dealing with his father first because it is less complicated, he was apparently unhappy and Tiscali did not hold him to the contract he had signed up for but promptly allowed him to return to BT as he requested. I don't find much to complain about Tiscali in that.

2) You say your service went live on 19th June. Given the normal length of time between signing up and going live you must have been almost the first customer Tiscali had for this new package. I know it was announced at the end of May, but I was under the impression that sign up was not possible till later. Not that I doubt you, of course!  You are probably aware that with any ISP, line faults such as a crackly line remain the responsibility of BT engineers, and Tiscali (or anyone else) is in their hands - all they can do is chase BT. It sounds as though the exchange personnel messed up the connection when making the switch over.

Other points. I use Tiscali software and modem with Windows Millennium edition with no problems. While Tiscali support is not perfect (no helpline which appears to work from a problem flow chart is) and they do take an excessive time to admit to general faults such as the recent email "denial of service spam attack" I have been with them for over a year and I signed up because various members of my family had been with them for longer and were quite happy.

I think with any large company you will get some customers with good experiences and some with bad. It can be a mistake to generalise too much, and if you search the net you can find horror stories about virtually all ISP's. It is only my opinion, but I think this is partly due to the fact that ISP's supply a service but the line is BT's and the PC's are the customer's but only the poor old ISP gets the blame every time there is a problem with your internet connection.
 

Hi Abaty

 Scepticism is healthy.

I didn't exactly fall over in haste to sign up for the Tiscali deal, but I was surprised at how quickly it went through - if only because I expected a longer delay in the phone line handover.  It appears that my exchange was already kitted out with the LLU (local loop unbundling kit) which Tiscali have paid to install on BT premises.  My Father-in-Law was offered the reduced price service where line rental was not yet included because his exchange would not be LLU for a few months.

 I was astonished at the approach of only Windows XP or above being catered for in the install CD.  The modem should work fine with Windows ME, but Tiscali have made the decision not to support earlier versions of Windows because, over time, they tend to develop problems that are a nightmare to support.  I sought confirmation of this from two different sources in Tiscali before my Father-in-Law left Tiscali.  I offered to track down earlier drivers, but he wasn't keen on not having Tiscali support if things went wrong and I wasn't around to help.

I understand that Tiscali need to liaise with BT for access to exchanges, and that technical problems can happen, but I do feel that it is only common courtesy for people to return your calls when they promise to, keep you up-to-date on when problems may be solved, and take steps to solve problems in less than a fortnight.  For example, I understand that they finally got my broadband "synchronised" yesterday (4th July), but that the department dealing with the phone line still needs to get that sorted out before it will actually work.

As it happens, Ofcom takes the view that "reasonable" is a subjective term, and that to guarantee that I am not myself in breach of contract I should allow a calendar month before everyone would say the delay was "unreasonable".  So, I am with Tiscali for a while yet.

I entirely agree, any company can generate horror stories.  And Tiscali probably has a great many satisfied customers. But it is only when things go wrong that you find out how good their customer care is.  As an example, two separate members of the High Level Complaints team have promised to phone me back personally on my mobile and have failed to do so.

Accordingly, I have posted here to warn people that the level of customer care when things go wrong may not be as high as one would wish.
 

Updating progress:

I am currently getting some decent attention from Tiscali's various support departments and have had several phone calls, on my mobile, over the past couple of days.

Today, 6th July, I received a call to say that they have tracked the phone line fault to the exchange and are to get an engineer to investigate. You will be impressed that I didn't say, "No sh*t, Sherlock", as I had guessed that might be the case 17 days ago.  In fact, I remained very polite, despite being sure that they told me over a week ago that the engineers would be visiting the exchange.

Still, progress is progress, and there's hope of a resolution before the month is up. 

 

im currently with sky on there so called max packaged, max now that is a joke if you call an average speed of 1.5 meg fast, now the point is im thinking of switching to either tiscali or bt but im still not sure which is the better of the two.

Despite the notes from dun diggin above, and various other horror stories on the net about Tiscali, you can find just as many if not more about BT plus every independent survey I have seen reports a higher customer service satisfaction rate for Tiscali relative to BT.

 The speed you can get depends on your line, not the package, and one of my grouses is with suppliers who sell you a more expensive so-called higher speed package without warning you that you won't get any higher speed down your particular connection. I have a friend who is with AOL and had a 2Mb package, though her line is only capable of giving 512K. She queried the speed she was getting with AOL who told her that she should upgrade to a more expensive 8Mb package. She did, but needless to say only got the same speed. They now say she is on a new contract from when she upgraded and cannot cancel!  At least if you sign up online with Tiscali the process includes a line speed check, and they will tell you what speed to expect and offer you an appropriate package. (try broadbandspecialoffers.co.uk)

If you currently have BT line rental you should be able to get free or reduced line rental - depending on your exchange - with Tiscali, but if you have your line rental with anyone else you may have to switch it back to BT first and they will insist on keeping it for 12 months minimum. In that case you can still have a talk and/or Broadband bundle with someone else but not the line rental specials. Tiscali is still cheaper than BT if you ignore the misleading initial discounts offered by both companies.

I would be very cautious abou any Tiscali product. I've been waiting to be connected to the Tiscali basic broadband service since the 13th December 2007. I only live half a mile away from the exchange, so this kind of service is pretty poor. What makes matters worse is that Tiscali do not even bother to keep me informed. I'm taking my custom elsewhere.

I upgraded from Tiscali dialup to broadband. I'm not a heavy user, and the broadband itself works okay for me, but it's taken a long time to get it set up properly - Tiscali conveniently billed me for 4 months of dialup and broadband and I've only got back two months' worth at the moment.