Tag Archives: tiscali

Warning: Tiscali changes broadband usage allowance

This has gone through very quietly, but I noticed today that Tiscali has changed its usage allowance for broadband.

It was originally 100GB per month, and I think it must have changed very recently as when I did my broadband investigation last month they were still quoting that.

But if you look on their website now, it says:

screenie

It probably has something to do with the new ownership of Tiscali by TalkTalk.

Just a little warning for any existing customers or people thinking of joining Tiscali. I’m glad I noticed that one. 🙂

Tiscali to be bought by Carphone Warehouse

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.

Tiscali Router (Siemens SE587) and confusing port forwarding…

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.