Switching ISP Blog

[Big.Wayne]

I'm not sure how long I've had ADSL? but I remember lots of people having broadband when I was still surfing on my £15/Month dial-up 56k account.

At the time the choice of broadband packages was very small, it was pretty much BT-OPENWORLD and I think it cost £35/Month (+ £50 set-up fee).

Alcatel Thomson Speed Touch USB Manta ADSL Modem - aka 'The Frog'

After some time the prices started to drop and lots of different ISP's begun popping up offering better deals. Eventually I thought I'd jump on the ADSL bandwagon and joined Tiscali Broadband. I think it was a 512Mbps connection and cost £19.99/Month.

I stuck with this account for years, never really had any problems and although 512Mbps was quite slow compared to the top end packages it seems really fast to me as I had used dial-up for ages!

So as the years past the broadband speeds increased and Tiscali upgraded all their customers to better accounts. I think it was about a year ago they did my last upgrade, they changed me from a 1.0Mbps connection costing £19.99 to a 2.0Mbps connection costing £14.99


My Tiscali 2.0Mbps Broadband Connection

For reasons unknown to me there has been more and more Tiscali ADSL Outages over the past several months and I have found it quite frustrating not being able to surf or download anything so I told myself it was getting time to try out another ISP.

I did have a look at BT Broadband but once again the prices were more than I wanted to pay so nothing happened, I just stuck with Tiscali and put finding a new ISP on my list of things to do.

I was having a read of this forum the other day when I saw a few different people mention a website called Sam Knows, never heard of it before but I went there and looked up what services were available in my area. . .


Big Up the Chelsea Massive!

I saw a couple of guys post here that 'BE' was a good ISP so I did a quick gOOgle . . .



Spent an hour of two having a read about this ISP and it all looked good. I liked their website and image and the prices looked really good. I have been wanting to get a broadband router for a few months now so was pleased to see to that I will get a free *Be Box*

But I've never switched ISP's before and was worried that it would be a load of hassle and a headache. Luckily I read yet another good post here where a guy was talking about MAC codes and how this can help speed up a transfer to a new ISP. BE also has a lot of info about MAC codes on their website so I had a good read of the procedure and decided to hit the sack.

 

[Big.Wayne]

Double busy morning and it wasn't until lunchtime that I got a chance to sit down and give TISCALI a call to cancel my service.

I wasn't looking forward to this call as I know ISP's don't really like to lose customers but I was half prepared to stay with them if they offered me a smashing deal. I spoke to a nice lady and explained I wanted to close my account with them and get a MAC code. The nice lady asked me the reasons I wanted to switch and I explained there has been more and more service outages and I felt I wanted to try something new. She offered to *fastrack* my complaint to an engineer to see if they could fix me up but I said no thanks but thanks anyway.

She then told me that I would have my MAC code in the next 1-4 days which surprised me, I was kinda expecting her to give me the code right there on the phone but no. She checked that they had my email address and also asked for my mobile number.

So call done I got back to work thinking it would be ages before the MAC code got sorted, luckily half an hour later an email arrived . . .

Nice one! Mac code sorted so the next thing was to get BE on the phone and get my new account set-up.

Dialled the BE number and got myself into the sales queue thinking I would be waiting ages but surprise surprise I got through to a human being after waiting on the phone for about 1 minute, great!

Had a chat with a guy called Rudi who sounded like he was dutch (funny accent). He took my details including the MAC code and told me an email had been sent containing payment details etc . . .

I thought to myself this is easier than I imagined it would be, I got it in my head that changing ISPs was a bit of a nightmare but it looks like things have become quite organised these days . . .

Rudi had told me it could take a few weeks to get everything sorted so I was kinda hoping he was making a conservative estimate. My Tiscali service is working ok at the moment so I thought no problem just relax and see how it pans out. Cracked back on with work feeling good and at the end of the day I got another email from BE . . .

Man thats great, looks like this time next week I will be all hooked up (finger crossed!).

I gotta admit I am impressed so far by how quickly things are getting sorted, I just hope I don't get a long gap in service when Tiscali ends and Be begins!

 

[Sone]

I gotta admit I am impressed so far by how quickly things are getting sorted, I just hope I don't get a long gap in service when Tiscali ends and Be begins!

i cancelled pipex and joined aol without mac codes ansd still only got a days downtime

 

[Thomss]

nice thread, good to see!!! I'm thinking of going to Be* from NDO soon.

 

[Big.Wayne]

Crikey they are not hanging about! . . . Less than three days since I made my initial order and payment has been taken, the line is nearly setup and the Be Box has been despatched . . .

 

[melbourne720]

Nice blog Big.Wayne I'm going to go with Be, probably the Pro service as I need the fast upload speeds.

Which one did you get?

 

[Big.Wayne]

I missed the Parcelforce guy yesterday but he came back today and dropped of my package . .

Oh its quite heavy what inside?

Front and back of Be package

Good stuff, the Be Box, a quick start guide, CD-Rom and welcome letter.

My Tiscali connection is still running which is handy and all things being equal I should be ready to go tomorrow (Thursday) which will be exactly one week since I first picked up the phone to arrange my new connection, thats good in my books . . .

 

[Big.Wayne]

Had to open the package and see what bits'n'bobs were included . . .

Looks like a good bundle, not even sure what some of the bits are for? (plugs with green ends?).

And heres the back of the Be Box, I like it, my first broadband router

This is all included free with Be Value which costs £14.00/Month with a 12 month contract.

That's certainly a very good deal, what do you think?

 

[tolien]

I might be wrong (can barely see the ends), but the plugs with green ends (next to the USB cable) look like BT plug to RJ11 converters.

Remember that if you leave all that lot has to go back, so it would be a good idea to hold onto the boxes.

Nearly signed up for 3 months with Be myself, but the spare line I had got ceased.

 

[Caged]

The phone adapters are for the VoIP part of the Be Box.

 

[Phemo]

At the time the choice of broadband packages was very small, it was pretty much BT-OPENWORLD and I think it cost £35/Month (+ £50 set-up fee).

When I first got BT Openworld it was £150 installation and £40 a month Still think 40 quid a month is reasonable to be honest - after all, seeing as most people had 56k or ISDN in those days, their call charges and ISP costs would probably have come to the same as that, if not more. I think it might even have cost me extra for installation as I had ISDN and had to do a migration to ADSL (which at the time wasn't guaranteed to work as the extended reach ADSL had just become available).

Luckily I was just about able to get 512kbps ADSL - even the BT engineer was surprised (no filter self-installs back then ) as the first thing he said to me when he walked through the door was "don't get your hopes up, we've had 5 installs fail around this area recently".

The jump from ISDN to ADSL back then was just insane, I don't think any speed upgrade I've had since has had the same impact for me really. Even though my speed has been doubled from 10mbit to 20mbit, the largest free boost I've ever had, it's still not as impressive as ADSL seemed back in the day.

 

[alexakasloth]

Sounds like a good deal to me

Why do you need a BT phone line for broadband though? Why not a VM phone line etc.

 

[Phemo]

Why do you need a BT phone line for broadband though? Why not a VM phone line etc.

Because the kit that your ADSL modem communicates with is at your BT exchange. Virgin Media's phone lines don't go to a BT exchange as they have their own equivalent which offer no ADSL service - as indeed they don't need to seeing as cable Internet would be available also.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Yeah thank god for Migration, its a piece of ****, ive done it twice now, and both times its only took 7 days to do, and all ive done is get out of bed, switch comp on, says invalid username/password (or whatever it says when they do the switch, i forget), so type in new ones, hit connect and voila, ive only every had no net for as long as its took me to type in my new details and hit connect (which was about 5 seconds ).

 

[Big.Wayne]

Just an quick update. . .

I am sitting at a clients using his connection.

Sadly its all gone **** up for me, my Tiscali account was ceased late thursday night and my Be account has failed to launch, therefore I have had no internet connection at home for a few days!

Apparently BT engineers haven't connected my line properly at the exchange, and have failed to do so on three seperate occasions?

Last time I spoke with Be support (1st time connection problems) they were hopeful that it would be sorted today. . .

Haven't been offline for so long in years and years, kinda feels like I've given up smoking or similar!

Hopefull back soon with some good news.

 

[marc2003]

bummer.

 

[Tripnologist]

Apparently BT engineers haven't connected my line properly at the exchange, and have failed to do so on three seperate occasions?

I had a similar problem.. except it was BT who disconnected my line a full day early.

 

[Big.Wayne]

My Tiscali 2.0Mbps Broadband Connection

Wow, 12 days late but at lunchtime today the new service sprung into life!



Certainly a big difference from my previous connection, webpages are loading instantly and downloads are of course a lot quicker

I intend to switch a few friends/clients over to Be so hopefully none of them have a delay switching on like I did. I must say that the Be techical support were first class throughout which was a good thing. Apparently they had to raise *six* faults with BT to get the problem sorted, in the end a sagely Frame-Engineer was despatched and hooked me up pronto!

That's pretty much the end of this thread but alls well that ends well . . . just a few weeks after getting fed up with my old ISP I am sitting here very happy with my new service . . . I'm paying slightly less, have a much faster service and have got a cool wireless ADSL Modem/Router . . .

 

[melbourne720]

Glad you got it sorted in the end Big.Wayne. Did they tell you specifically what the BT guy did wrong?

I'm just getting paranoid as when I move next week I'm having a new BT line connected and I want it all to go smoothly, and have broadband with Be ASAP.

 

[Big.Wayne]

Did they tell you specifically what the BT guy did wrong?

From what I could make out the BT Engineer wasn't connecting me to the Be equipment properly (in the exchange), the engineer would then close the fault meaning Be had to raise a new fault again (and again!) after the third attempt they specifically asked the engineer to call them while he was at the exchange so they could run some tests, sadly he didn't call, just inspected the line then left.

This is the only web page I saw for over a week!

and here is a more detailed look at the router page with the fault still unfixed. . .

It seems I was still connected to the old Tiscali ADSL service as can be seen from the bandwidth row at the top (288/2,304). Also you can see that there is no connection to the RoutedEthoA.

Hopefully no one else gets hit by a long delay because its no fun being offline for 1-2 weeks. I had to visit one of those web-shacks to keep up with my emails but there always was a big queue to nab one of the crusty pentium machines so I gave up on that option and in a moment of desperation I loaned and installed a 56k modem and did some emergency dial-up surfing at 45Kbps

It all seems to be good now though, glad I change and good luck to anyone else switching over to Be!