Right then… I made a promise to myself to not publish anything that was personal to me, or was directly linked to what was happening in my life - I guess I wanted to have a bit more of a subjective view on what I was talking about. However (here it comes!) I have come to the conclusion that “tiscali”, the ISP, suck ass, and I can’t miss the opportunity to educate potential customers what they’re in for. Now, if you’re reading this Tiscali (doubtful) then I can only vouch that these are my personal opinions and in no way reflect on your business as a whole. Have they gone? Good, I’ll continue then…

(also it kind of follows on from the last post.. ish)

First things first. I’ve been having problems with Tiscali. For probably a good 6 months or so, although I’ve been blaming everything but them.. I was bought rather kindly by my brother-in-law a copy of Battlefield 2 at Christmas. We had talked for a long time about the game and (to be honest) I think he bought it really for his own sake rather than mine, so we could play online together after such great times on bf1942. Anyway it is a really cool game and I’m glad he bought it because it is uber-fun online, which leads me to my next paragraph..

It seemed that within a few months (of doing the whole bf2 learning thing) I came to the conclusion that bf2 was a bit “buggy.” Now this conclusion was arrived at by observing the so called “red-blue bug.” What this bug means is that the odd person from my team appears as though they are on the enemies team! When this is observed by me, I kill them (natually.) I then get credited with a tk (or team kill) which costs me points during the game, ruins my stats and generally means I won’t progress at the rate I perhaps should during the game. Now I’m very anal about this stuff, so if I play a game, I expect it to work without bugs and within the confines of the game itself.

So I blamed bf2. I blamed the windows firewall (changed to zonealarm), blamed the OS (changed to win2000), blamed my USB devices(steering wheel etc.), blamed my PC and motherboard (brand new), blamed my memory… etc, etc. You get the idea… Anyway, I didn’t think to blame my internet connection until…

secondlife

I tried to log onto secondlife and (as I understand) it relies heavily on UDP traffic. This program had MASSIVE packet loss. I mean to the order of over 150%. And of course it just didn’t work because of this… Now since this experiment (and let’s face it, I don’t even care about secondlife anymore) I just want things to work, and bf2 (relying on UDP) didn’t work as advertised (although it’s not EA’s fault.)

I did research on TCP and UDP protocols over the internet and then phoned Tiscali. It appears they know even less than I did before my research because the words “bandwidth” and “protocol” seemed even to be a bit of a problem for their 1st line of support. I finally got through to their 2nd line of support, which was basically a supervisor for the plebs on 1st line… What sort of SUPPORT IS THAT???? So I get through and he’s like (his name is Gary, although his actual name is Gauraub or something) and he’s very apologetic and he promises to get the telephone company out to check my line - which after loads of research and lots of convincing on my part doesn’t help him to understand the problem’s at the server end, not the line end. However, after my explanations of “doesn’t make a difference” he still goes ahead and does this, so I give him his 48 hours of work and benefit of doubt before I contact him again…

Here I am then. 48 hours after “Gary” or whatever his name is said the problem would be fixed by some magical BT engineer with the SAME FU@K*NG PROBLEM!

The crux is that now I have moved my phone calls to BT (2 minutes after getting off of the phone from Tiscali,) and I am also about to get the MAC for my internet connection so I can move to Pipex in the morning. Well done Tiscali, like good job dudes… Your problem and your lack of support/information has now MADE me move away from your pathetic company to hopefully a more professional company in the UK that doesn’t require me to contact Bangladesh everytime I have a problem… I can’t wait for the swap over!!!!!! And I can’t wait to stop wasting my money on a company that doesn’t even care or listen to it’s customers…

There, so I promise that’s my only personal rant for the year.. OK, well, maybe my fingers are crossed OK?? Satisfied? :o)