The interesting thing is that most of the discussions appear to be about one thing VERY low Download speed.
Its pretty well known that if anyone complains too much on their forums that the posts are deleted, and poster banned
Unfortunately nothing much seems to have changed. Even way back in 2003 when adsl was in its infancy and there was only IPStream, their Centrals were congested more than 'normal' ISPs back then. Theres some screen caps showing similar from
2005.
When I did the "
capacity report in early 2006, I was told from a fairly reputable source that Tiscali were running their centrals at 150:1 at the end of 2005. Since then things havent improved and due to the subsequent <8Mb speed increases, I would imagine that you could double that, because although customers now have higher speeds they havent increased their bandwidth in line. :/
LLU will have eased the burden for a short while as they moved more users over, but as they move more users over and also increase their speeds then that contention ratio drops way back down again
Its also a bit concerning that there have been at least a few offers of purchase, but as soon as they opened up their books, the prospectives backed down, which implies to me that it must be a bit of a mess.
I think Tiscali are scraping by the skin of their teeth. Generally, the type of users they tend to attract are those that get suckered in by their false 'Unlimited' advertising. Once in they either dont know much better,.. or if they do then the user is stuck on contract or LLU. Admittedly there are a few on LLU who do seem to be ok.. but their IPStream and DataStream has always been a bit of a mess. Unfortunately it seems like their LLU is now heading the same way