You get what you pay for....

[DR]

Tiscali UK has expelled "just over 500" broadband users for excessive use of the ISP's high-speed internet service. Those who've received their marching orders are being given the opportunity to leave Tiscali "without penalty.

The ISP says the bandwidth "hogs" have gorged on between 30 Gig and 150 Gig a month. At the same time, the average Tiscali UK punter uses less than a Gig a month.
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In a statement the company said: "Like other ISPs Tiscali has a small proportion of very heavy users. This group of less than one per cent currently hog around 30 per cent of total bandwidth.

"It is therefore necessary for us to protect the service for the other 99 per cent considerate users by establishing an acceptable guideline for use and serve notice of termination, which we are able to do within the scope of our current and previous Terms and Conditions, for those who are affecting the quality of service for the rest."

Tiscali UK has changed its Ts&Cs warning all 350,000 broadband users that they now have a 30 Gig a month allowance. in light of the changes, it says it is "no longer appropriate to promote [advertise] these services as 'Unlimited', even though for most customers their experience will that of an unlimited service".

Some readers have contacted The Register claiming that Tiscali UK is enforcing this 30 Gig cap rigidly and that, in reality, it equates to 1 Gig a day usage. the service deteriorates noticeably when this limit is hit, they say.

Tiscali UK denies this. A spokeswoman said: "We are not capping daily use and in fact the 30 Gig a month is currently only a guideline to be enforced when necessary. We think it is only sensible to give customers a guide as to what we consider as 'heavy use'.

"Any poor level of service experienced by the customers who have contacted you might be down to the fact that we have grouped together some of the heaviest users on a 25:1 contended service."

In June 2003 Tiscali UK booted off a bunch of heavy dial-up users after they ignored requests to reduce their online usage to less than 150 hours a month. As with its broadband hogs, Tiscali UK amended its Ts&Cs to impose the cap on its AnyTime dial-up service claiming that some people were using the service excessively and that their "level of usage is adversely affecting the service we can offer other users". ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/09/tiscali_hogs/

[Moby-Dick]

25:1 contended service

seeing as BT's contention ratio are 50:1 its not that bad is it ?

As a consumer ISP , there are better though , like Zen

[Stoo]

but all those 25 will be online downloading at full tilt virtually all the time..

[Norky]

No way can you download 150gig of legal stuff a month. Unless it's porn.

[Marcos]

How about we get some competent ISPs in the UK that can offer maybe even HALF the service that americans get?

They get half price, twice the speed, no-limit connections, and we're here feeling sorry for our poor ISPs who cant match them?

[[GSV]Trig]

Cos were in Britain where everyone complains on the forums but doesnt actually do anything about it, lots of complaining but we just take it...

[Marcos]

Indeed

[aidanjt]

Trig.. we complain here because the rest of the country is completely ignorant and clueless, we are few so will be ignored by BT and ISPs..
But your absolutly right, we are ripoff britan because we're pushover britan.

[Lee H]

How about we get some competent ISPs in the UK that can offer maybe even HALF the service that americans get?

They get half price, twice the speed, no-limit connections, and we're here feeling sorry for our poor ISPs who cant match them?

Don't blame the ISP's its the monopolising folks at BT you have to thank for our lowly ADSL speeds at the moment. They've just announced that they are going to be releasing ADSL2+ ( yeah right...how much is that going to cost us hey Pierre Danon or whoevers in charge this week? ) and the speeds will be able to support upto 18 Mbps but who's going to have the capacity to support 100's of these lines on their networks as the 155 mbps pipes BT use for ISP's cost an absolute fortune.

[aidanjt]

to be fair on BT, they are having their balls squeezed in a vice thanks to ofcom and the government, being forced to open out their exchanges, forced to set certain wholesale prices, forced to keep their phone charges high, all in the name of pro-competition..

I for one don't want weak competitors hampering the progress of BT.. I'm not a BT fanboy by any means, i still hate the bastards, but it ain't all their fault either.

[aidanjt]

I might also add that having anything more than 4mbps at home is completely and utterly pointless, the chances of maxing out even 4mbps with a single download is nearly nil, much less 18mbps, I can't understand whats with the obsessive 'need for speed' attitudes, personally i'd be happy as a pig in ****e with 2mbps SDSL.. I wish BT would focus on that instead of wasting resorces on ADSL2+ network development/intergration.
oh, and ADSL1 is capible of 1mbps upstream and 8mbps downstream, so whats the point in having ADSL2+ if they havn't even streached the limit (or anywhere near as close) of the existing technology?..

[Nemeliza]

aidanjt your not taking into account business users, who regularly exhaust their 8mbit lines.

Also would you still be as happy with 2mbit SDSL if everyone else was using for example a 12Mb downstream and 6Mb upstream ADSL2 ?

Keep crushing them balls ofcom!

[aidanjt]

Nemeliza.. why wouldn't I? they are tapping away at remote servers which probibly wont use any more than 1/6th of their *theroetically maximum* bandwidth. And who's going to pay the perimum for the extra pipes the ISP's have to pay to the backbone providers if users start downloading like Xeon workstation users multitask?..

[DaBeeeenster]

I might also add that having anything more than 4mbps at home is completely and utterly pointless, the chances of maxing out even 4mbps with a single download is nearly nil, much less 18mbps, I can't understand whats with the obsessive 'need for speed' attitudes, personally i'd be happy as a pig in ****e with 2mbps SDSL.. I wish BT would focus on that instead of wasting resorces on ADSL2+ network development/intergration.
oh, and ADSL1 is capible of 1mbps upstream and 8mbps downstream, so whats the point in having ADSL2+ if they havn't even streached the limit (or anywhere near as close) of the existing technology?..

I have 4MB in my office and regularly max it out.

[Norky]

It's not entirely BT's fault, in America there are hundreds of Telco countries running things, in the UK BT have to do everything. Now they are being forced to unbundle all the exchanges. Admittedly they should have done this from the offset, but I doubt ADSL was even invented when the exchanges first went up.

Oh well, fibre optic network by 2011!

[spazman]

2009