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05 Jul 2006
Tiscali has successfully fought off complaints that it was not able to supply the broadband speeds advertised in a national magazine campaign.
The complaints were levelled at the internet service provider by members of the public from Middlesex and West Lothian who had subscribed to its broadband services.
Tiscali's ad offered 'up to 1Mbps' and 'up to 2Mbps' packages and the complainants challenged whether this was misleading, because they believed that Tiscali could not provide the full rates of those services.
The ISP maintained that its residential broadband is a contended service where customers share the 1Mbps and 2Mbps bandwidths.
The speeds are dictated by the number of customers online at any given time, which was why the company advertised the speeds as 'up to'.
"Tiscali asserted that all their customers were capable of achieving the advertised 1Mbps and 2Mbps speeds and that customers should experience speeds within the ranges stated by BT Wholesale," said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling.
"These are 200-1000Kbps for 1Mbps customers and 400-2000Kbps for 2Mbps customers. Tiscali said that it did not monitor customer download speeds because they did not believe it was practical or common industry practice."
The ISP explained that it only investigated when a customer reported a slow
speed.
The advert was investigated for substantiation, honesty, truthfulness and
availability of products but the ASA did not find Tiscali in breach of any of
these elements.
The ASA noted that the contended service would lead to customers experiencing different speeds depending on a number of factors, but considered this to be common knowledge among average broadband customers.
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How can they get away with it!
I am having a very similair problem but i think i have found out how they work. Now lets give the details of my ?advertised connection? I have the ?unlimited 8mb tiscali package? Basically meaning you can download as much as you like before peak time 6pm till 11pm, how ever if you download allot durin peak time they will start to restrict your internet speed. Now all of the statement is a lie, i shall state why, luckily i get some weekdays off as i am a college student who knows a fair bit about computers so some indian on the call centre cannot tell me garbage. Anyways back to the point i have found out that during weekdays early morning 1am till 5pm the internets is fine speed is 6meg to 7meg which is a download rate of (820kb?s) now i download demos off xbox live play games against gamers from around the world out of peak time but when 4pm (which isnt even peak) People start to come home from work and use the internet you start to notice the internet degrading and when peak time hits then BAM! im down to under half a meg (230kb) now i have followed there guide lines with the fair use policy But this is dreadfull it seems they restrict every user during peak time which is a rip off for people who work during the day and get home at 5pm. They come home to peak time speeds not allowing them to enjoy the internet payed for? But you may say noo its okay because theres the weekends, well that is not true.. ive conducted some internet speed tests on a variety of websites especially www.speedtest.net and it seems even off peak the speed of internet is less than half a meg. Its obvious to many of you aswell that when peak time comes tiscali somehow enables a bandwidth limiter to all of its users no matter how good they are with following the rules. I have given up arguing with them they just wont listen and they wouldnt give two ticks, i am just waiting for this contract to finish and then read reviews of ISP?s on the internet carefully and read the small print!
Posted by: Sina 05 Apr 2008