World Online

All I wanted from an ISP was simple. A competitive price, a good connection rate and a half-decent service. When I signed up with WorldOnLine, the price was excellent, connection rate and speed was OK and the customer service reasonable. However, when Tiscali bought WorldOnLine, everything changed. The price started to creep up, the connection rate reduced and the customer service was almost non-existent. All I wanted Tiscali to do was to change from billing one credit card to another. Not too difficult I thought. I called them up and they sent me a form to fill in, which I returned immediately, this was in July 2001. The month afterwars, my ...  Read the complete review

For those of you who want to get to the meat of the review, here's a quick summary. Tiscali/WorldOnline/Screaming.net is THE most appalling ISP ever created, and I've used AOL, so that's something. Let's have a look at why this is the case, by going through my experience with the Great Net 'n' Web Swindle. September 1999. I see something in The Times about a new ISP called screaming.net. Apparently, this new ISP does not only offer free subscription, but also FREE CALLS OFF-PEAK!!! Wow! One catch. You have to change your phone company to LocalTel, but they're basically a BT reseller, so it's not ...  Read the complete review

I always planned to come back and update this as promised. When I came to look how prominent it was in it's category, I was rather surprised to find it as the "top opinion". This gave me an extra incentive to include the latest developments, which are detailed below. Bear in mind that this was originally written around Christmas time, which gives you the context to the seasonal feel to it. Just before you start, you should know that the latest incarnation of Screaming Net/World Online is Tiscali. I'm not saying that Tiscali will be guilty by default but I sincerely hope that their approach is more customer-orientated than their ...  Read the complete review

I have never seen a company change policy and services so much! I joined World-Online long before they were taken over by Tiscali and originally took up the unmetered option with the transfer of my telephone services to them, only to be told that this was being withdrawn and would be replaced with the 100 hours per month 'Freedom' package. After a certain amount of scrutiny, I decided that it wasn't so bad as the unused minutes carried over and I was unlikely to use the full allocation any how. Not so long later, World-online decided that it was no longer going to operate telephone services! This time I was pretty disgusted, but after ...  Read the complete review

I joined up with World Online last year, after seeing an advert in a national newspaper saying 'unlimited unmetered access for 14.99 per month', the only catch seemed to be that my phone line had to be switched to the World Online system, and even this was a simple matter of a straight switch between BT and WoL. Too good to be true? read on..... They seemed only too happy to sign me up under the conditions of the advert, but all was not well with World Online (A word to the wise about the small print, always check what 'subject to change' actually means). I hadn't even logged on under the unmetered service before they contacted me to say that ...  Read the complete review