I Had No Idea
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 27, 2008
My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out!
I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring – it was because I was living in a HomeChoice bubble! Broadband (DSL at least) has seriously crashed and burned in the four years we’ve been on our HomeChoice LLU cable. There was I wondering why people would grumble about getting less than 8Mb when our 2Mb connection gave me more than I could possibly download at speeds I was perfectly happy with. That’s because it was running at pretty much full speed the whole time.Now that we’ve been booted on to Tiscali’s execrable DSL system, I know what all the fuss is about. This is a disgrace. Something has to be done.
Current candidates are Sky and Virgin, and possibly Be. The complicator is the TV though. Tiscali is a TV/Broadband/Phone bundle. Coincidentally, FreeSat launches next month – or does it? Despite being a huge BBC/ITV joint venture, it seems more like a top-secret SAS mission. Not even Lord Grade’s mother knows the truth, I’ll be bound. Mind you, if it’s all a Great British Cock-up (as I rather suspect), there’s always FreeSat From Sky. Good to know we still have good branding agencies in this country, eh?
Comments
im with sky and between 6-9pm its really slow (or they throttle web traffic). outside of those hours i get up to 12mb from their 16mb service.
ive only ever heard good things about be in london, however you dont get the price benefit of double / triple / quadruple play etc
Good luck! I’ve been with Virgin since they took over NTL. The admin / customer support sucks – but that’s kind of de riguer these days.
I have consistently good download speeds just under 400 KB/s on a good day and the upload speed has improved recently ( I get about 45 – 50 KB/s per second).
Its a bit pricey at £25 per month. But you could haggle.
PS. Have you tracked down Stuart or a minion recently ? ;)