Tag Archives: broadband

Tiscali to be bought by Carphone Warehouse

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It was announced this morning that Tiscali, a large internet service provider that supplies 1.76 million people with internet, is about to be sold to the Carphone Warehouse for in excess of £236 million.

The Carphone Warehouse hopes to merge Tiscali into it’s current broadband service within the next 2 years, however they have said that Tiscali email addresses will be spared.

Tiscali has recently lost customers as they seek other broadband companies with better customer service.

This is not the first time Tiscali have been on the market. In fact, they’ve been on the market for over a year now, and they’ve had talks with Sky and Vodafone although both potential deals fell through.

Tiscali is currently suffering with the large amount of debts it is currently in.

When the Carphone Warehouse and Tiscali are merged together, the Carphone Warehouse will supposedly have more than 4.25 million broadband subscribers and that will place it 2nd in the broadband market.

I’m currently using Tiscali as one of my ISPs and to be quite honest the longer the wait for them to merge, the better. I am quite happy with Tiscali’s current internet plan and I hope that their current plan isn’t overwritten. Their current 8MB broadband is really decent value, especially baring in mind that their fair usage policy states that they won’t get at you for your usage unless your nearing 100GBs per month in bandwidth – and that’s tonnes. TalkTalk’s similar current plan has a 40GB usage and costs £17.74 per month, however Tiscali’s up to 100GB usage plan costs just £14.99.

So the longer the better in my opinion. But that’s where Tiscali is heading anyway.

100MB broadband available for the first time ever in the UK!

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It’s called Velocity 1, and a very small new building development in the UK has been given fibre optic cabling from the exchange right the way to the ethernet sockets in your living room. Tenants of Wembley City development in London are the first ever people in the UK to be able to get 100mb broadband on demand.

This means that for the first time ever, 100mb is not the theoretical outcome for the speed of broadband because the fibre optic cabling spreads the whole way from your local telephone exchange to the ethernet plug on your computer. No ancient copper cabling whatsoever.

However, there are a few small glitches. The main one being that it isn’t permanent – you pay £1 for 30 minutes worth of 100mb broadband on demand. It isn’t technically possible to provide 100mb broadband 24/7 in this country, yet. The rest of the time you’ll get either 8, 16, or 32mb broadband depending on what you are currently paying.

Still, you can’t get 100mb broadband anywhere else in the UK so it must feel good to be able to say you are one of about 30 people in the UK who can use 100mb broadband on demand. Pretty awesome.

Most of the UK generally gets a theoretical maximum of 8MB (megabit) per second. And most of the time that isn’t the case because of our poor copper cabling and long distances from our exchanges. But for the means of this, I am going to suggest that I did have 8MB (megabit) per second speed. Now think about the fact that a megabit is not a megabyte. 8 megabits translates to approximately 1 megabyte, so if you had perfect 8 megabit download speed, you could download a file at 1 megabyte per second.

Now, think about this – 100 megabits translates to 12.5 megabytes per second. That is pretty amazing. That means that providing the source server is fast enough, people with 100mb broadband could download three 128kbps MP3 songs in just one second!

Now that might seem like absolute gobbletygook to you, but considering the UK’s  current average broadband speed of 3.5 megabit (0.4375 megabyte) per second that is pretty awesome.

So, maybe in 10 years time a lot more of us will be able to indulge on 100mbps broadband. Unlikely, but it would be nice. We’ll have to see what happens.

Tiscali Router (Siemens SE587) and confusing port forwarding…

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I use Tiscali Broadband very regularly, and generally the service they provide is fantastic. The broadband is very cheap for what you get, and most of the time I have no problems. Except…

The Tiscali router firmware is quite strange. Especially in the port forwarding settings. In my scenario, I need to be able to port forward my Network Drive up to the internet so I can access it when I’m not at home (or so that downloads on http://download02.geekonthepc.com work). Ok, that’s fine, I just put the port forwarding info into the config settings…

 

Router Config

Look OK to you (you might want to see a full size image but clicking on the image)? Looks OK to me.

So I go to test it – open up Filezilla, and go to my IP, and wait a sec – connection rejected by server? What?

So I go back and check the settings again. No, they are fine. What’s going on?

Well, after several hours of endless confusion, I’ve finally worked out how (oddly) it works.

It does actually port forward, however if you try and access it on the same Tiscali router you are trying to port forward from, for some reason the connection is rejected. But if you go to another wi-fi connection, it will allow it and you’ll get in.

It’s very odd, but at least it’s working. You can be sure that its working if you go to http://status.geekonthepc.com/networkdrive and it’ll ping it from the Tiscali router (update: the server has since been taken off the internet).

So there you go, Tiscali port forwarding does work – it’s just a firmware bug that Tiscali/Siemens should just sort out.

Virgin Media starts demoing 50MB broadband

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It was confirmed yesterday that 200 customers in a town called Warrington in Cheshire have been invited to demo 50MB broadband for 2 months at no extra cost. Customers who agree to the offer by the 18th November will receive a new modem. In exchange for the upgraded speeds, they will have to fill in a few questionaires.

Warrington was chosen because “a high proportion of  Virgin Media customers in Warrington are already using higher speed packages”.

The firm has upgraded it’s network to support DOCSIS3 standards. 

The company will release their new package, the “XXL” package, mid next year.

Sky Broadband – the ONLY broadband that’s truely unlimited

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I heard this out a while back but I didn’t really think to post about it. 

Anyway, according to Channel Five’s (UK) The Gadget Show, Sky.com is the only company in the UK that provides truelly unlimited broadband. On their full maxed out package, they recently removed their fair use policy and have told The Gadget Show that there is no cap whatsoever. Hopefully, this will persuade other companies to make their broadband fully unlimited.

So, if you’re looking for a full on broadband for all your download needs – head for Sky.com’s MAX package.

I myself have never needed full on broadband – I would’nt have thought I download more than 20GB a month on a busy month. Generally I suspect I download about 10GB a month, depending on where I am.