I’ve got broadband at home at last after nearly 3 months struggle with Orange. I had to ditch them because they are so crap and register with Tiscali instead. What Orange couldn’t do, Tiscali did in just 10 days. Wow!
Moral of the story – if you want peace of mind and quality of service, stay away from “free stuffs”. You always get what you pay for – well most of the time anyway 🙂
Experienced similar problems myself in the past. I rang wannado for Broadband. Was using a wirless laptop so opted for their wireless broadband service. On the face of it, seemed like a good service.
I couldn’t get the wireless modem to work, rang them and their customer service was the worst I had ever experienced. They sent me another modem, but this was as bad as the first.
In the end I cancelled and went with Bulldog instead. Found out that their wireless modems were crap and many people had stumbled across the exact problems as me.
Recently there have been many tempting offers from two established media/tech companies: sky and ntl.
NTL were doing broadband, telephone and cable(can’t remember exactly how many channels) for £30.
Sky were offering broadband – upto 8mb, 100 channels and phone line(but line rental was payable to BT) for £26.
Because of the fierce competition in the broadband sector companies thought if they offer a combination of services, may win customers over from their rivals, this works to an extent but their are many tradeoffs, ie. if the broadband service is not what it says it is. Word soon gets around and customers relent from switching over.
Carphone warehouse were the first in the UK to offer free broadband for their users, but their service was not very consistent and many users complained about not being able to go online whenever they wished to. If you were using the phone line you couldn’t use broadband.
Now that is pretty pathetic.
So I would suggest to users to be careful and do some prior research when selecting a broadband provider. search the web, compare deals and go with the one you thing is right for you.