Crap Tiscali Management Guilty of FRAUD

[AndyM4c]

I am i am sure just one of thousands of disgruntled Tiscali customers who feel that Tiscali have conned them out of their money. Since Tiscali screwed me over I have been doing a bit of research and it seems that exactly what happened to me is Tiscali policy. Let me explain I have been a Tiscali customer for 2 years on the Max package thats Upto 8mb broadband Tiscali Talk and Line rental. For the first 12 months I was happy with the service I was getting but things started to go wrong since Jan 07. I was in NewZealand as was my whole family. Everything at home was turned off, incl the router and no-one had keys to get in while we were away how is it then when I get back I get a FUP email. Since then my speed has deteriated to the point I now never get above 512kbps. I have had all the bs excuses from Tiscali tech support. Faulty router-replaced that. Faulty or substandard telephone extention cabling-replaced that im using cat 5e twisted pair cabling better than the stuff bt uses. Fault at the exchange- been onto bt who checked no fault at the exchange. So for a year Tiscali have continued to take £17.99 from me for an 8mb service and only provide a 512k service. Finaly my patience snapped last week and I requested a MAC code. Boy you dont know how tempting it was to tell them to act like a pelican and stick their bill up their backside but I restrained myself. Anyway on Wednesday morning I get a call from Sky giving me an activation date Wednesday afternoon my broadband is dead. Rang Tiscali tech support and got the usual class of zombie got me to do all sorts of tests even a speed test duh Ive got no internet. I am a computer engineer and know beyond doubt that the tests they asked me to do were pointless. They claimed there was a fault at the exchange however bt said there was no fault. I rang Sky who said that had there been a fault they would not have been given an activation date by the Open Reach engineers. I know who I believe and it isnt Tiscali. Today I rang Ofcom at 4.30pm and they rang Tiscali at 4.57pm and guess what my broadband was back on at 5.21pm what an amazing coincidence (my arse ). Then tonight I get a call from tech support telling me there is a fault at my exchange (yeah right) and also one at Tiscali Server which means that according to this guy HARSH in India all Tiscali customers will have speed problems for 3-4 weeks.

For more info on this problem see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01...blems_ongoing/

You should also check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01...ex_migrations/ which, although relating to the Pipex buyout, indicates that Tiscali have effectively placed a ban on any form of downloading wether you use bittorrent or itunes. This ban is poportedly just during peak times but as I have found with uTorrent is efectively 24/7. In uTorrent to maintain any sort of speed during off peak I have to go into preferences and regularly (every 20 mins or so) change the port I use. My son is a regular Americas Army player and the tounaments frequently fall in peak time the game requires a d/l rate of upto 60kbps and u/l 40kbps. These rates are knowwhere near the speeds advertised by Tiscali but are enough to get an FUP. From my research it appears that Tiscali are unbundling their lines from BT on mass to save money and be able to both turn a profit and attract new business with low prices. While there is nothing wrong with this in principal when it adversely affects their existing customers Tiscali should come clean and admit to what they are doing. They wont however because if they do they will be faced with a massive compensation bill to all their existing customers as well as a huge fine from the regulator. Instead they rely on customers calling their tech support which they make a bundle from. Their tech support are told to lie and blame BT which will result in repeated calls to them creating more revenue and all the while they are charging you for a service they know they cannot provide praying that the regulators never catch them at it.

I have been paying for this crap spending hours listening to recorded messages about how much they value my call well no more now they have p*ss*d me off now I fight back. Just because I had the cheek to go to another ISP they cut me off well stuff them revenge is a bitch. If you want to join me in seeing these con artists get the justice they so richly deserve then email me your Tiscali horror stories. To be precise give me detailed instances where Tiscali have obtained money from you by deception wether it is charging you for a service they have failed to deliver over a sustained period (ie pay for 8mb line is cabable of say 6mb but you get 2mb) or disconnecting your bb after requesting a MAC code and then charging you for it or as I have read and hopefully will not experience charging you after you have left them. If you forward all these details with a contact email address to the email below then once I have over 30 complaints I will forward the lot on to the Serious Fraud Office. The crap they put us through cannot just be down to the frontline staff they have to be following orders from higher up the foodchain and its them that I am after. Oh and I will also forward them onto Trading Standards, the ASA (conning b*&stards are still advertising on T.V. superfast broadband even though they know that at the moment they cannot provide it) and Ofcom (speaking to them they need lots of complaints in one go to fine Tiscali to the magnitude that Ofwat recently fined Southern Water for those that dont know they were fined this week 23.5 million pounds for consistently providing poor service and lying about it (sound familliar) and that fine cannot be passed onto customers).

My advise do regular speed checks with for example www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk at least once a day and whenever your speed falls below what you can reaonably expect keep a note of the time/date/download & upload speads also use Tiscalis own speed checker (http://speedcheck.ispconnect.co.uk/) as well, even though its crap, as it provides a reference number they cannot deny. If you do this it will give you ammunition for any claims you need to make.

Oh and while we are on the subject of Tiscalis crap speedchecker if you want to amaze your freinds with the super fast broadband speeds that Tiscali provide try this little trick

1:/ goto http://speedcheck.ispconnect.co.uk/

2:/ click on speed test link

3:/ a popup will open which contains the speed test minimise this popup

4:/ wait a minute or two and click on the speed test link again

5:/ wait a minute or two then open the popup by clicking on it on your task bar (should be DSLConnect UK Ban...)

Lo and behold you have the super fast broadband Tiscali advertise ( regularly get speeds in excess of 250mbps --oh if this were true) check this link to see for yourself

http://speedcheck.ispconnect.co.uk/r...512&recorded=1

Perhaps this is how Tiscali conned the ASA into beleiving they really could provide superfast broadband.



Send your emails to ajlmacleod@googlemail.com



<<< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<POWER TO THE PEOPLE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


P.S. theArc: in the future if someone asks you to pick up the soap be afraid....be very afraid

P.P.S. For any one who is interested including any Tiscali employess this is truly superfast broadband and if this guy can do it why cant Tiscali???? http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/inte...eid=1857379299

[IanG999]

Huh, you should be so lucky! At least you have a connection. Since the 30th I have been cut off both in/out phone and BB. So how the hell was I supposed to report the fault? I tried using a mob but my PAYG credit soon ran out and I gather from all the posts in here that a wait of an hour or more is not unusual - is that typical?

So I posted a fault via their web s(h)ite. Got no response for a day or so so I jojned the forums. Fat lot of good that did me as I was banned for having the temerity to ask why I had no response from the tech guys after a day. They seem to forget who is paying their wages.

So all in all their high handed attitude has blown my (admittedly) short fuse and I phoned up for a MAC number. They told me as I have the line on Tiscali I would not need a number. So I contacted BT and asked to get on their line rental and BB ASAP please. That will be a few days yet but in the mean time I got a silly response from India by email. I could quote the whole thing here but it was the usual list of dumb-ass questions like have you tried different filters, 'what happens when you ring your own number what message do you get'? FFS I told them it was impossible to make a call!

Last message I had said they had passed it onto the 'concerned' department.

But I have also sent a strong letter by registered post and email saying that they have taken money without providing a service and I consider them to broken the contract. (I know it is only a week or so but I guess this could drag on for months). The Trading Standards suggested this with a particular form of words.

Reading the T & Cs closely I see that they can disconnect you for 30 (thirty!!) days and still be within their rights. Basically I am saything that is unreasonable since my line has worked for years and they disconnected it. I'm not asking for a rural connection or some hard to get to place am I?

In the past I have battles with organisations like Abbey and OpticalExpress and I have found much the same attitude. What seems to work is sending letters by registered post to the directors home address (found by asking companies house for a small fee). They do not like that.

I can send info off list if you like?

Cheers

Ian

[tommy t]

yes please

[tommy t]

yes please that would be gr8 i could cause them sum inconvienence then

[soopaflyguy]

Pending strike off on companies house website

[biker]

where does it say that ?

[biker]

ok, found it
So this is one of their dormant business names and not the trading name. As far as I know this means nothing. If you check your contract, you will see it's with Tiscali UK Ltd

[wkscreams]

hello mate

Can you check this text out about Tisculli
http://www.the-scream.co.uk/forums/n...reply&p=224751

Can you please let me have detail so we can send complaint & hopefully get some money back.

Thanks

[tommy t]

if you have not already sent tiscali a formal letter of complaint then you i suppose better start there both addresses are listed in these forums , also you can also involve a third party such as CISAS or ISPA cisas will assist you in getting compensation,but cannot do anything until 12weeks have elapsed from the date of your formal complaint (that can be a e-mail and telephone )as well as a letter if you still have the e-mail or and a record of the date time and the name of who you spoke to if possible,as tiscali are very capable of denying that you contacted them, so the recorded snail mail(post) is the best method

TISCALI CUSTOMER SERVICE
CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGER
PO BOX 7206
KILN FARM
MILTON KEYNES
MK146XG
(tiscali call centre)

Tiscali UK Ltd
20 Broadwick Street
London
W1F 8HT

(tiscali head office)

just incase it still works head office phone number 02070872000

Working Tiscali desk support in a team of around 30, of which 10 and reducing fast had any real computer knowledge. The rest were lured from sales on by an extra £1000 per year. As sales team they were admirable, but as tech support???

Tiscali are paid for time of call, but call centre is paid per call. Someone costed the project to average call handling times of 8 minutes, instead of the necessary 15 to 20 minutes to diagnose lost TV/Broadband connection with checks and tests, and to log all for future reference.

While many calls concerned loss of BT OpenReach services, many broadband connection problems were due to common problem of incorrect configurations, which apparently not many support engineers, and even less available management leaders knew how to fix.

Lip service is paid to diagnosis by checking line usage, getting customers to switch things on and off and key in ipconfig. If problems do not seem to be with the line customers may be told after several phone calls that the problem lies with their software and are referred to vendor. 1st line support should know this basic stuff, but taking the time to run proper checks adds to call time averages, drastically upsetting leaders chances of promotion, man of the year awards and bonuses. Meanwhile customers suffer. Some were told to buy new equipment or get their drives formatted.

Lucky customers give up and find a computer literate friend or pay for a professional. Others are promised speedy resolution and thanked for calling. Customers who won’t buy it are passed to another department who promise the moon and /or pass the customer on / back. They may even get passed around to several departments before being put out of their misery and getting “lost” ie dumped. especially if you have trouble with the Queen's English. Average call handling times depend on these ploys

Angry / argumentative / persistent customers are told to stop shouting and cut off, ensuring that they will call back at least several times before eventually being directed to complaints email or snail address.

When this complaint has eventually passed through the bottle neck in the Philippines, it will be sent on to several departments before finally arriving at 2nd or 3rd line support, who will then refer customer to vendor. The odd customer will strike lucky and get to talk to a manager with some technical ability – very rare these days, although many bluff their way through with confusing jargon and steely resolve. Eventually after enough calls, and much frustration, an engineer may be booked to replace equipment and, while there, correct configurations, thus being visibly seen to solve a “faulty equipment” problem, when no such problem existed - although some do, even new scart leads are notoriously faulty.

One guy had 3 engineer visits, including one from BT OpenReach, to resolve his ongoing intermittent service problems with no joy. After checks to configurations and cables were tested, because no evidence in logs suggested they had been made yet, (again detailed logs add to time penalties) although customer said checks had been made several times. Confusingly all seemed to be well. In desperation a tech support agent who gave a **** asked him to check the outside line before again calling in the engineers. Unbelievably, his phone line was seen to be resting on top of his neighbour’s satellite dish!!!!

The occasional customer quits the service, but then again it takes many calls to Cancellations –if you can get through at all - to actually succeed in cancelling a contract. Usually customers are passed back to “support”

Some get lucky and get an idiot who will actually take time and risk targets to resolve the case and log a detailed account as per training and common sense. You would think so many calls ending with customers' profuse thanks, some weeping with relief would be evidence of some competence in the field? Sadly not, the agent was quickly manoeuvred right out of a job after one of the last remaining computer literate managers was moved to sales

Presumably Tiscali accountants still haven’t caught on, with all the compensation and engineer callouts, but are desperately trying to sell sell sell. Presumably management will get promoted and moved on to kill off SKY

I seem to remember hearing that the Tiscali top team reside in Bali or the Caymans or some such paradise!!???!!

By the way Tiscali, calls only cost 5p per minute if your line is with Tiscali and 10 p if not

[tommy t]

that 5p per min charge would be if you are tiscali customer and your phone(tiscali line) actally is working,otherwise it could well be a mobile phone used,but at the end of the day tiscali do not provide the service they are advertising in most cases, and have this poor standard of customer service ect,so the best way of dealing with them is to start by way of a formal letter of complaint,followed by the involvement of every organisation that can assit you,eventually leading to a full re reimbursement of all subscription fees paid since date of complaint, plus account closed and mac code issued should the matter not be resolved in a timely manner as set out in their contract t&c's, probably the best way is not to believe their ads and stay well away

i am with tiscali and i realy dont like the service they are providing my dad signed up just for the internet he was payin bt for the line rental we were gettin a realy good service then. until last year tiscali phoned up askin if me dad wanted to turn to tiscali for the internet phones and other stuff since then we are only gettin maximum of 544kb

[tommy t]

i am with tiscali and i realy dont like the service they are providing my dad signed up just for the internet he was payin bt for the line rental we were gettin a realy good service then. until last year tiscali phoned up askin if me dad wanted to turn to tiscali for the internet phones and other stuff since then we are only gettin maximum of 544kb

Originally Posted by kev09

Your possibly fully unbundled if you are on the llu network,

if you are,then i believe going back to bt can mean a significant period of downtime,both calls and bb,and they used to ,maybe even still charge to transfare you back on to bt network, so not a good move i would say,and as for the low speed that ain't no surprise ,i had 12mths of hell ,never again,it's a joke outfit get out if you can that's my advice