Broadband Spped and services in general:
Personally, I think one of the best british 'rip offs' yet telephone companies and broadband. You pay for broadband but if you have a complain or problem with your service, you ring them on an 0870 number (generally 10p per minutes) you are made to wait (and I have waited on occasions for 45 minutes) before someone attends (aol and tiscalli being the main culprits) then when finally you do speak to someone, there are three senarios
1. telephone operator is foreign and doesn't understand your accent or indeed his command of english is less than acceptable.
2. The non english understanding telephone operator will not detract from the 'laid out template' which after 20 minutes usually results in them having to send you a disk, hence you are off the telephone and the next time you ring you have to do it all again.
3.They blame your computer - which after (you take it in to your local PC repair centre) is confirmed as being OK means you have to go through it all again. For the princely sum of approx 10p per minute. Rip off Britain - wish I was an ISP I d be rich for supplying sub standard products with a customer base who pays for the privelage!!

I totally agree. The worst offenders being Virgin who it seems only employ the educationally subnormal and are selling bandwidth they don't actually have to sell. Something needs to be done to stop these criminals

Actually, I've been with Virgin for about 6 months and had no problems at all. On the few occasions I have had to phone them they've been understandable and helpful.

Tiscali?NEVER again,had 7 days of HELL...yet to even connect,they blamed lines at our end,3 BT engineers CONFIRM fault lies with tisc.spen 3/4 hr TELLING them this/being on hold,they then ADMIT error,fob you off with load of FALSE promises...so?today?highlighted WHAT a rip-off they are in the computer press!=lets see how they like this
kind PR!

I have 2 broadband providers BT and Eclipse and when both go into slow mode they both come up with the same your router is at fault your filters are faulty your computer is in need of a clean up. Whatthey dont realise is that I hear the same reply for all my clients as I try to get the broadband working for them. I have now got to the point of telling the support that I wish to speak to a senior not the school kids and can now talk to intelegent people that have a lesser knowledge than mine I had the first Broadband and acted as a tester after many problems with ISDN I hate the so called slow down but understand that if we had fibre optical lines all the way we would all have great speed but we have exchanges like the motorways multi lanes then packed into single file routes over stretch the distribution or the Pipe as BT call it and the Band Width the ISP pays for is jammed to bursting hence the cheaper deals get the slower package. You get what you pay for. My friend in France has 50Meg and on a lovely 100% new line across fields from his state of the art exchange, he is to get shortly 100Meg. No wonder he moved to France.