Tiscali in financial trouble??

pdw8

pdw8

pdw8

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Tiscali shares have been suspended on the Italian Stock Exchange after falling more than 50% over fears they cannot pay bank debt repayments.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/09/tiscali_suspended/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7932339.stm

This could be bad news for all Tiscali, Pipex, Freedom2Surf and Nildram customers, my parents included.

Its not really surprising to see a big ISP in trouble after all the margins are very low and they rely a lot on advertising on their homepages etc.
 
pdw8 said:
Tiscali shares have been suspended on the Italian Stock Exchange after falling more than 50% over fears they cannot pay bank debt repayments.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/09/tiscali_suspended/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7932339.stm

This could be bad news for all Tiscali, Pipex, Freedom2Surf and Nildram customers, my parents included.

Its not really surprising to see a big ISP in trouble after all the margins are very low and they rely a lot on advertising on their homepages etc.
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I suspect a lot of people are going to say 'good, they deserve it' pretty soon.

From my point of view, they've been a good transit provider (though they slightly ****ed me off by refusing to acknowledge a recent outage was caused by a known juniper bug) and are fairly reasonable in price terms. It'll be a pain replacing them if they do go under.
 
#Chri5# said:
Devil's advocate... if your business model worked, you might not be struggling to repay your bank debts...
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The UK business model does work, that's why sky were prepared to pay in the region of £400m for it. Tiscali felt it was worth about 50% more though. Either way they wouldn't even have been talking if the business model was defective.

While tiscali may be a rubbish ISP for people on here but the majority of broadband users still just browse the web and download the occasional song from itunes. For them there's not much wrong with Tiscali, sure others are better but Tiscali aren't unbearably bad either.
 
Sky just wanted the userbase and possibly some of Tiscalis transit to merge with their own (they may currently rent transit from them at a wholesale level).

Whilst the majority of Tiscali's userbase will probably be low usage users, there is nothing that isn't offered elsewhere cheaper and that is often better.

To me they are just another generic ISP with a poor customer service reputation, offering nothing new and having draconian measures in place should you wish to actually 'use' your connection.
 
I hope things don't go wrong for them.
I'm using a business level connection from Nildram.
I don't have any option of LLU with the exception of Talk Talk.

I get 830k up & 8mb down (I live so close to my exchange I do more or less get the maximum ADSL MAX can offer).
I get top speeds at nearly all hours and in the past 4 years I've been with them I can count on one hand the number of outages I've had.

I really hope they can pull through.
 
Ive been with pipex for many years no problems for me ever speed never an issue or down time, infact over the many years prob only had 4 down times.
and on all occasions was eary in the morning around 3 ish.

In the early days Pipex were know to be the dogs ******** and still are for me.

ps. Must say that when i heard about Tiscali getting thier hands on Pipex i was exspecting problems but nope no probelm here in fact this past month my bandwidth has increased by 150kbps :)
 
I'm not worried. If they do go bankrupt then some other company will pick up their customers.

Hope so anyway. I'm currently quite content with my 14mbit Nildram connection :D
 
If they do go under does that mean their customers can walk away from their contracts? As I am with them at the moment and just waiting for the contract to expire as they have peed me off lately.

On a plus I have been with them for about 5 years and only had maybe 5 times that I went down for more than an hour.
 
bloodline76 said:
If they do go under does that mean their customers can walk away from their contracts? As I am with them at the moment and just waiting for the contract to expire as they have peed me off lately.

On a plus I have been with them for about 5 years and only had maybe 5 times that I went down for more than an hour.
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Not unless their lawyers are truly hopeless.

Speaking of Tiscali their peering with Sprint in the US is all over the place this evening, had to shut down our 10Gbit transit port with them in the end, that's a dent in capacity...
 
Tiscali's customer service and technical support is absolutely dire. I had major issues with accessing secure websites and constant disconnects and the SNR was not setup properly and they refused to admit it was them and they kept telling me to "clear my cookies". I ended up having cancel and I am now with Be* who are great and as soon as I left Tiscali, all my problems went away.

Tiscali can get stuffed, there's plenty of good transit carriers around to take over.
 
I'm in two minds here as an ex loyal customer of Freedom2Surf when they were just a small ISP I'll be sad to see them go (as they're now owned by Pipex/Tiscali) but at the same time... I have had no ends of troubles with Pipex I hope they go bankrupt.

For the last 4 months we've been billed twice each month for our broadband... at times we're paying close to £50 per month (inc phone calls) for a service that is horridly slow (litterally boarding on 56k speeds at times), terribly unreliable (down for days at a time, weekends at a time), seems to be throttling me at peak times (decent net speed until you want to do anything like download music, or watch a movie).

The customer service is terrible, for some reason we now have two accounts with Tascali/Pipex... lord knows why.

On average over the last 6 months we have phoned Pipex 10-20 times a month and absolutely 0 issues have been resolved. The only thing they have done is give us a small rebate and a £10 good will gesture; but the issues didn't go away and neither did the double billing!

I'm cancelling my contract with them in the next few days, they're having a laugh if they think I'm paying the remain 6 months of it considering they've billed me twice a month for the last 6~ months.
 
bigredshark said:
Not unless their lawyers are truly hopeless.

Speaking of Tiscali their peering with Sprint in the US is all over the place this evening, had to shut down our 10Gbit transit port with them in the end, that's a dent in capacity...
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Maybe you should change transit providers;)
 
Tiscali is solely responsible for misinterpretation of simple word "unlimited" in this country and across Europe. They are also guilty of overselling beyond any sensible levels and promoting business model straight from Nick Leeson school of money making. I understand most of their customers are happy with the little service they get but then again it's like saying most customers in India are happy with local rail service, it gets them to places, even if it means hanging off the train like bananas.
What tiscali do, the oversold, ever expanding scheme with false advertising is a clever crime. It's an old dialup scam that should have no place in modern society. What they sell to people is to real broadband what carton box would be to semi detached property.

So I'll be happy to see them go on principle, just as a warning to other shareholder motivated "internetings providings" type of outfits - what goes around, comes around, scrooges.
 
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My experience with tiscali from a business perspective has been generally good. Thier wholesale of transit and LLU, coupled with thier UK support team has also been good.

I really hope they can weather this out, as for hoping they would go down the pan, maybe it would be worth considering the people they employ before writing sweeping statements on forums from a place of limited knowledge or complete ignorance.
 
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