When we were living in Brighton we used to have cable TV and Internet from NTL who, despite their bad reputation, I never had a seconds problem with and was always very happy with their service and would certainly recommend them to others. However the only reason we went with NTL was because we didn't have a BT phone line and BT wanted to charge us over £150 & dig up our garden to put one in. At our new house though we do have a BT line and rather than go back to NTL I wanted to choose a new ISP and take advantage of the various deals out there, many of which are cheaper than NTL anyway.

I considered several companies but ultimately as our mortgage is now higher we wanted to find one that was cheap but still reliable rather than pay a slight premium for some of the 'better' companies out there. In the end we decided to go with Tiscali as their 8MB connection with free phone calls was one of the cheapest packages we could find and I know a few people who use Tiscali and have never had any complaints.

The sign up process was nice and simple, just enter your phone number, details and the package you want and you get a message thanking you for your order and saying that it can take 15 days for your line to be tested, account set-up and free broadband modem dispatched. 15 days later, nothing. Then we get another e-mail from them saying that the post code we gave didn't match the phone number and asked us to confirm all our details. Now there's three problems with this.

1. If I'm signing up with an ISP it's not unreasonable to assume that I don't have an Internet connection and so sending me an e-mail is a fat lot of use! Fortunately a local friend of ours let me check my e-mails so I was able to reply.
2. The post code we originally gave was correct so I have no idea what the problem was other than it was nothing to do with us.
3. It now meant that we were still another 15 days away from getting our Internet connection up and running!

After re-submitting our details we finally got another e-mail 4 days later saying that our account was now up and running and that our modem would be despatched to us. So we waited.......and waited. A week later we still hadn't received anything and checking our account it still said that the modem was due to be despatched but they had no time scale for it!
In the end I gave up and ordered myself a Linksys WAG354G 4 Port ADSL2+ Gateway along with a Linksys Wi-Fi PCI card for my desktop and a Linksys WI-Fi PCMCIA card for my laptop and just manually set-up my Internet connection.

Normally I have always used Netgear Wi-Fi routers and cards but the last one I bought was utter rubbish and constantly caused all my computers to crash with the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). After some research I found that this was a common problem with these components and was caused by a conflict with the via chipset that all my motherboards used. Now that I have gone over to Linksys there is no going back, they are so much better than Netgear, better build quality, more reliable, easier to set-up, more configurable, less tempermental, hell they just work and work well.

I've now been using my Tiscali account for about 2 weeks and am, so far, very happy with it, speeds are consistent and high and so far there hasn't been any noticeable down time although my modem still hasn't turned up and my account status still says that they are going to despatch it. I won't hold my breath!