Crackerwax

So it’s come to this. Not content with advertising a 2 Mbps service as 8 Mbps and providing a piss poor service in general, Tiscali have now throttled our broadband service to a ridiculous extent.

It started when we got this helpful message from them the other day.

Your broadband Internet usage has been highlighted as exceptionally high during peak periods and is affecting the service that we provide to other customers.

Hmm, not quite sure how that works we don’t actually use it that much, besides I didn’t realise they considered that they provided a service, I always assumed their primary goal was to make sure that the Direct Debit came out of your account each month. They go on though.

If you do not reduce your usage during these peak times we will manage your usage. This means that you will share bandwidth with other heavy users during peak times instead of sharing bandwidth with normal users. Your service will continue to be unlimited, but by sharing bandwidth with other heavy users you are likely to experience slower speeds during peak times.

Well, it seems like they’ve just gone ahead and done that anyway as I’m sitting here at 23:45 and I’m trying to watch a video on YouTube, a one minute long video, and the progress bar’s just sitting there not moving.

In fact just to prove things empirically, look at this, this is the speed report from our 8 Mbps ADSL connection:

Speed Down 72.45 Kbps (0.1 Mbps)
Speed Up 369.45 Kbps (0.4 Mbps)

How shit is that? We’ve got a faster upload speed than we have download! Well, I say faster but that’s relative isn’t it? Looks like Tiscali have pissed on their chips, we’re moving. I say Orange Broadband, anyone got any better suggestions?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.