Telly/Phone/Optional broadband HELP!

[Muttley08]

The others are cheaper...but Sky have the best channel line-up

Shame it's a Murdoch thing....but the Sky+ thing (record / and pause live telly)is quite handy - esp when you need a beer refill while watching cricket....

[gingerjedi]

The service that I have is with Tiscali (previously Homechoice, this only used to be available in London and home counties, don't know if that has changed since Tiscali took over).

You get Telephone, Broadband and TV down the phoneline. The basic package is £15 a month, which gets you 2MB broadband, most of the freeview channels and a few more, plus some on demand stuff. But you need to pay BT £10 a month too for the line. SKY Sports 1,2,3+Xtra is an optional extra at an additional £26 a month.

It means you don't need a dish, which in my case was important as the freeholder of the building does not allow dishes to be attached.

Over the years I have had cable (local company that was subsequently taken over by telewest), Sky (but not for broadband) and now Tiscali.

For reliability I found cable was the best, but remember that was not one of the big boys.
Sky only ever went down once (it had been very windy and the dish had moved!).
Tiscali has been the flakiest, but it is not too bad, and I think since Tiscali has taken over the service has actually improved. In the early days there were a couple of line problems which turned out to be BT's fault. The remote control died once which was my fault, and the two year old set top box died last week. It was replaced within two days. Once in a while the TV service goes down for a couple of hours, but not recently.

Tiscali was the worst for me, I clocked up about 6 hours on their laughable help line and in the end I had to report my case to offcom at which point they had to admit defeat and let me go from their 12 month contract.

I had drops in service up to 10 times a day, it slowed to a snails pace at peak times (traffic shaped) and according to them it was my router that was at fault?? How some guy in India with a 10 point crib sheet would know that is beyond me.