Tiscali Letter 1
Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to you today for several reasons. I cancelled my account with Tiscali due to very poor service and I feel I was unable to fully explain this when I cancelled the account. My reasons for cancelling the account date back to the beginning of my starting to use Tiscali as an ISP. I contacted your customer service to ask whether Tiscali was blocking any ports for incoming traffic, the girl I spoke to had absolutely no idea what I was speaking about, although she at first appeared to. After a 20 minute conversation (at National rate I might add) in which she had me restart the computer and the router, it finally emerged that when I was asking about ports she thought I meant the RJ45 sockets on the back of the router! This was a minor inconvenience, however it added greatly to my phone bill. I have also had severe issues with bandwidth limitations, when I signed up to Tiscali it was advertised as Tiscali Unlimited. However I soon discovered that this was not the case when I was sent numerous fair use warnings. Upon replying to this I was informed that Tiscali does not restrict the amount you download, but ask you to reduce bandwidth in peak times. This in itself is fair enough, however as the service was advertised as unlimited I was greatly concerned to find that my ISP could not comprehend that this was in fact a restriction of the amount I could download.
I was unable to use my Tiscali email account for several months as my web browser crashed during a session, and the server kept me logged in permanently rendering me unable to log in and check my emails.
I also find it highly inappropriate of Tiscali to change the pricing of the service I was on and not reduce my payments to match, or upgrade my service for free to the 8Mb plus service that now costs what I was being charged for the 2Mb service. Most ISPs do this as a matter of course, I feel I should at least have been notified of the changes so that I could make an informed decision as to which service to use.
The final reason for me electing to discontinue my account with Tiscali was when I moved house, I informed Tiscali and received an email on September 11th 2006 confirming the Cease and Re-provide, the email informed me that it could take up to five working days to cease the service, and then 10 working days after the new line was fitted in my new home for the connection to be resumed as normal.
10 working days after the date I had supplied for the reconnection to begin, I still had no connection to the Internet, so I phoned Customer services in order to get an ETA for my connection. It emerged that whilst the connection at my old home had been discontinued, the technical team had not even begun fitting the equipment into the exchange. The Customer Service Advisor offered to send an email down to the Technical department as urgent, but as I was told it would take a further ten working days I instead elected to cancel my account with Tiscali and go with an ISP that I could trust to do what was asked of them, and that I knew had some technical knowledge. As Tiscali had not seized the line yet I was able to have the Internet up and running within four days.
I recently contacted your customer services having noticed that Tiscali have still been charging my account. I was informed that this would be passed onto Head Office and investigated. I am writing to you today to inform you that I have contacted my bank and reported the charges under the Direct Debit guarantee. I did this for two reasons, firstly Tiscali have never acknowledged my new address, so any correspondence you send relating to this matter would most likely not be received, I have told Tiscali several times of my change of address, however the details have never been updated. The second reason for my contacting the bank is that as far as I am concerned Tiscali ceased my service on the 16th September (five working days after September 11th) and charges were made both in October and November. Regardless of the fact that I was still listed as a customer on your system, you were not supplying a service after this date, and as I told the Customer Service Advisor I am not paying for your Technical team to not even begin installing equipment in the exchange when the work should already have been done.
This letter is simply a courtesy to let you know that I have already recovered the money that was taken from me incorrectly, so that you do not waste resources investigating the matter. For your reference the phone number listed on my account was 01473715575 and the address was 268 Spring Road, Ipswich, Suffolk, IP45NN. As stated before these details are no longer correct so please do not use this address to enter into any correspondence with me.
Thank you for your time, and you may be interested to know that I am not the only person I know that has been highly relieved to be free of your truly awful service
Yours sincerely
Ben Tasker
