Topic: Tiscali

Tiscali has admitted that it kicked four of it's broadband users off after their being grassed up by the BPI.

The ISP says that it sent warning letters to 21 customers, but it seems the majority decided to keep their broadband connections by stopping sharing music over P2P connections.

It seems though that these will be the last casualties as Tiscali have said that they have ripped up the voluntary agreement with the BPI, which was the sort of deal the BPI would like to have in place. The problem seems to be that the BPI don't want to shoulder any of the costs involved, while the ISP thought it's agreement included a provision for sharing the cost.

The problem must be that the music industry is feeling hard up for cash due to file-sharing.

Tiscali has announced that it will offer customers technology to to offer its customers protection from dangerous online relationships.

The ISP has partnered up with online safety company Crisp in a bid to fight child grooming. It uses technology which they claim gives far better protection than traditional website-locking, blocking and word filters.
It analyses the content of online conversations to indentify inappropriate relationships that are initiated by predators wanting to groom, and potentially abuse, children. It also looks at sexual content, punctuation, aggression levels and sentence length, typing speed and vocabulary. Crisp compares all these elements with dynamic, minutely-detailed profiles of real-life groomers and genuine children of a variety of ages. Any potential grooming will be notified to parents either via a text message or email.

Crisp says that the software was independently tested by Cambridge University researchers and found to be 98.4 percent effective in identifying inappropriate relationships.
It will be available by a subscription service for £3.50 a month or £42 a year and will be available from March of this year.

Tiscali  has struck a deal with Disney-ABC International Television to allow it to show 400 hours of premium content to Tiscali TV subscribers.

This will allow customers on it's Entertainment Mix, who can view C1 which is Tiscali's VOD channel, to access shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy and Scrubs.

Customers can choose to subscribe to Tiscali TV from £19.99, which also includes up to 8Mb broadband, a free wireless router and set-top box and free weekend UK and international calls.

Tiscali has caused a bit of a stir with it's traffic management and has been forced to reverse a software installation after a mass of complaints.

The problem happened when engineers installed an upgrade on it's Cisco kit last week but saw customers complaining of  poor speeds due to it's traffic management, applications to suffer included iTunes P2P and Usenet. During peak times, 5pm and 9pm, some broadband users were getting speeds of 10Kbps while others found many sites blocked.

The problem arose as Tiscali and one of those ISPs who enforce traffic management especially during peak periods, while many think that this is unfair it's got to be remembered that the price that Tiscali offers 'unlimited' broadband would be unviable without it.

Althought this problem first came to light last week it seems the Tiscali engineers are still trying to fix them problems.

Tiscali is set to outsource support for the Pipex Broadband and Voice services to cheaper countries such as North Africa and India starting in January 2008.

The bad news is that it could mean the end of up to 650 job losses in it's UK call centres, which will start in January and take place over three stages until April.

The Italian owned telco acquired Pipex for £210m in September which netted it an additional 570,000 broadband and voice customers.

Tiscali UK has finally signed an agreement with Irish sports broadcaster Setanta to offer three premium sports channels on Tiscali's UK broadband-based television service.

The ISP has recently expanded it's internet TV service and plans to reach 10 million homes by the end of the year and will provide more than 80 channels of content. Those wishing to add Setanta will have to pay an extra £9.99 a month, but the agreement doesn't include an annual contract.

Tiscali, who have around 1.5 million broadband customers in the UK are to expand it's HomeChoice broadband TV (IPTV) service to cover most of the UK.

At the present the service only has around 50,000 customers in and around the home counties which were part of the Homechoice when the  IPTV provider was purchased by Tiscali last year. By the end of the year it homes to have the potential to reach 10 million homes and is targeting half a million of these to sign up to the service which is plugging the gap filled by those who want more than the basic freeview digital channels but do not want to pay for a full satellite or cable service.

Along with the broadband and IPTV service users will also receive free phone calls depending on the package, the basic one will start at £19.99 a month or £24.99 for the top package.
If customers still want more then an extra £22 will see them be able to watch the Sky sports channels which shows two thirds of televised Premier League soccer while Tiscali is also in talks with Irish broadcaster Setanta which shows the other live games.

While this is a step in the right direction, having the kids surfing and dad trying to watch the footie will only end up in rows unless customers live close to the exchange and are able to obtain a good connection. True IPTV is really a dream for most of us until BT finally start pushing Fibre-to-the-Premises.

Tiscali who are the UK’s fourth largest ISP have done a deal with Irish broadcaster Setanta to bring Premier League football coverage to its customers.

The ISP has already picked up the Sky basic channels after Virgin Media publicly fell out with Sky, but live premier football should bring more punters in. Setanta paid £392m to the Premier League for it's live broadcasts and having already done deals with BTVision and Virgin Media it seems as if the gamble is paying off.

Tiscali have not released any details of the pricing or availability of the broadcasts, but BT Vision customers who have a minimum contact of £17.99 a month get 46 live and 242 'near live' games while Virgin customers offers it free if customers have both their £20.50 XL package and take phone services from them.

Tiscali has added more content to it's Tiscali TV service following a deal with Sky.

In addtion to it's deal with Universal Pictures earlier this month, now it will be able to show the Sky basic package including Sky One on it's IPTV connection, which also includes the Sky Sports and Sky Movies. This may be a snub to Virgin Media who had Sky's channels cut after a dispute about payment earlier this year.

The Tiscali triple-play package which includes 2Mbps broadband, TV and free weekend calls costs £14.99 per month was launched in March this year.

Tiscali is dropping it's 1Mbps prduct down to  £7.99 for the first three months and £12.99 thereafter.

At the same time, certain customers in connected via Tiscali's own network could see them receive free line rental as part of a promotion to encourage people to sign up to their home phone and broadband bundles. While this is good news to those who live near a Tiscali LLU area it means that those who don't will have to fork out an extra £100 a year for the same service. This is something which is becoming increasing common with LLU providers which AOL has been criticised for.

Tiscali is ready to join up with Universal Pictures in a new service to offer Video on Demand (VoD) movies through Tiscali TV

It's announced the launch of it's PictureBox facility which will see films being delivered via it's Tiscali TV IPTV platforms. The subscription service will cost £5 per month and new titles will be added on a weekly basis, to start the service users can see Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, The Interpreter, Friday Night Lights and The Chronicles of Riddick, among other choices, with up to 28 films being made available per month.

Tiscali is struggling to sort out it's email problems which have stopped some users being able to send mail for over a week.

The problems started last Monday (21st) after customers emails started being returned as undeliverable and this has lead to a monster 21 page thread on Tiscali's support forum, with some users saying that this has been happening since the 3rd of May.

Tiscali have admitted that the ISP's email system 'has got a problem' and have have blamed spammers using their servers, but haven't stated if this was compromised accounts or servers.

Tiscali customers can now login to their webmail accounts with more security after the ISP has introduced encryption on the service.

When users login they will have the option to encrypting their connection with SSL (secure socket layer) which makes it harder for data to be intercepted. Tiscali have listened to their customers when redesigning the webmail portal and users can now log in and check email, update personal calendars and send reminders all from the same place.

Tiscali is offering it's customers the chance to create a broadband network in their home, without resorting to wireless.

The 'homeplug' option as you would guess uses the house wiring to connect all the computers together, the advantage according to Tiscali is that no drilling would be required and a specially trained engineer would install the system.

Although this is true the downside is that laptop users would need to plug into the mains, and a home network with speeds of 14Mbps is very limited, especially if users want to transfer files.
The other downside is the price, with an initial charge of £89.99 it's nearly twice that of Tiscali's wireless option, although it's nice to have a choice we guess.

Tiscali will launch it's re-branded Homechoice TV over broadband on March 1st.

It's first customers will be the existing 40,000 ex-Homechoice users who the ISP acquired when it bought the company back in August 2006. Although at present the service is only available in the London and Stevenage areas, Tiscali hope to roll the service out nationwide to Birmingham, Edinburgh and Newcastle during April and May, with Sheffield and Liverpool to shortly after. Tiscali hope to have Tiscali TV available to all of it's LLU network by the end of 2008.

The latest rumour in the broadband takeover frenzy is that BT are looking to buy Tiscali's UK operations.

The sale of the Italian groups UK assets has been on the cards for a while now, but BT seems to be the first name that has been mentioned. The Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore quoted financial sources and revealed that investment bank Merrill Lynch and BT are in talks to finance the deal.

The UK arm of Tiscali is thought to be worth something in the region of  £450m.

Italian group Tiscali SPA plans to sell its Tiscali UK division  according to a report in the Independent on Sunday.

According to the paper the telco sent a memorandum of sale last week to potential buyers, of which BT, BSkyB, Orange, Carphone Warehouse and NTL were mentioned as potential buyers.

The company is reportedly focusing on its Italian business after saying in September that it was selling its Dutch business and that it planned to withdraw from Germany and the Czech Republic.
The UK division of the company generates profits of around £30m per year, and bids are expected to be around the £600m mark.

Watch this space.....

Tiscali is to boost the size it's UK users mailboxes and as increase business boxes.

Users with a 10MB storage limit on their mailboxes will see this raised to a more respectable 100MB, with the present £12.99 per year  'commercial'  option which gave 100MB being increased to 1GB. This will being Tiscali more in line with most in the industry.

The individual maximum size of an one email is also being increased, to 10MB.

Tiscali have officially merged with Homechoice, and now the full details are being released.

Homechoice will contribute its British operations in exchange for 11.5 percent of Tiscali UK, and may increase the stake to 20 percent if profit targets are met. This will allow Tiscali to become a "triple play operator" in the UK offering broadband, telephone and television to its clients as well offering all of its clients Homechoice's library of movies, music videos and pay TV channels.

After three years, Tiscali will have the right to buy Homechoice outright, and Homechoice will have the right to sell its stake in Tiscali UK.

This could be good news for Homechoice who have struggled to make a market impression so far, its service is available to about 2.4 million households, mostly in London, but it only has 45,000 subscribers.

Tiscali have confirmed that they are after rival ISP Homechoice after rumours leaked in The Telegraph.

HomeChoice use Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) to provide both video and broadband service to around 45,000 customers, Tiscali would absorb this into their own LLU operation.

Tiscali users have been having problems with their email servers reports el reg.

Some unlucky punters have been without webmail and pop3 access since Sunday, although Tiscali say that it's servers are running at 80 per cent capacity. They do admit that some of it's servers are undergoing "critical maintenance" which as those who deal with IT know is techno speak for "oops we've had a ***** up and we are trying to fix things".

Tiscali says it has almost cleared a backlog of emails after users complained of delays on Tuesday.  They haven't released the exact details of the problem but have reported a "software glitch" although it has kicked off three "spammers" from it's system.

 To us a "glitch" seems to mean that either the system was compromised, or it's abuse monitoring software failed.

Tiscali has become the latest ISP to announce price cuts to its broadband products.

It is offering a 1Mbps unlimited connection for £14.99, while the 2Mbps unlimited product is £17.99. While they are marketed as 'unlimited' they are subject to a Fair Usage (FUP) Policy, where Tiscali will contact heavy users in an attempt to curb their usage, and after three mails Tiscali will throttle the available bandwidth , although in reality this should only effect users heavily into peer-to-peer usage.

Free connection and a free modem is also included, but users have until the end of October to sign up. The minimum contract term is twelve months.

Full details at Tiscali.

Tiscali customers who find themselves all alone can now find a soul-mate.

A two-year deal between the ISP and DatingDirect.com will see Tiscali users with their own channel, enabling them to search DatingDirect's 2.5 million members.

Way back in April we reported on the progress of migrating from the DataStream platform to a more common IPStream connection.

At that time the only DataStream ISP's mentioned was Freedom2Surf (F2S) but since that time one of the largest DataStream providers, Tiscali, has reported that it is Alpha testing the process and allowing users to move to another ISP without resulting in a 10 day disconnection.
After staff training the trials will move to the beta stage, which will last approximately two to four weeks, and allow 300 people to migrate. These are those that are outside of their 12 month agreement and wish to migrate away from Tiscali to another ISP.

More details can be found on a a website setup to track Tiscali's progress, www.whowantsmigration.me.uk.

Tiscali have signed a deal to with The Press Association to provide video bulletins to the Tiscali UK portal.

Subject matter will include news, sport and entertainment with users being able to access the bulletins for 30 days before they are deleted. They will be approximately one and a half minutes long and will become part of Tiscali's site-search and media database.
The clips are exclusively produced for broadcast from the Tiscali portal and so will branded as such, so no stealing ;)

All of the content will be UK biased to reflect the top news stories both worldwide and locally.

Tiscali has joined forces teamed up with newly formed film production company Dogwoof Digital to launch the first ever simultaneous film launch between cinema, DVD and broadband internet.

The film, EMR, will have it's premier at the Genesis Cinema, Mile End and on Tiscali’s on-line Film Club on Tuesday 12th July. On the Friday (15th) it will be available for download via the Tiscali UK website for £2.50, on DVD for £12.99 as well as opening at selected cinemas.

Recent developments have seen the distinctions between cinema, TV and broadband disappearing rapidly as more producers move close to online 'broadcasting'.

Related news articles

Watch on broadband first
BBC to preview via broadband
Channel 4 plans live streaming

Tiscali has teamed up with high street retailer WHSmith with a two year extension of their deal offering broadband services in it's 700 stores nationwide.

As part of the deal, Tiscali will launch a number of exclusive offers to WHSmith’s customers, including a 1Mbps Tiscali Broadband service with an Anytime phone line for £19.49, which offers free local and national calls.

Tiscali, has dropped the price of it's 1Mbps product from £15.99 per month to £14.99 per month until the 30th June.

The monthly usage allowance remains at 2Gb per month, and still included is the free modem and setup for new users. Tiscali’s content offerings, from films from Raindance and music from the Tiscali Music Club is also unchanged.

Details are on the Tiscali site.

The choice of unbundled (LLU) providers has been extended due to ISP Tiscali planning to unbundle up to 200 exchanges by the end of the year.
They plan to install equipment from Chinese manufacturer Huawei , whose kit will also be used by BT, having won a major role in the construction of  21st Century Network, into up to 700 exchanges.

Tiscali said it will have unbundled 27 London exchanges by the end of this week, rising to 200 by the start of 2006, and then onward to 700 by the end of 2006. This will mean that nearly 40% of UK households will be able to connect to a Tiscali LLU exchange.
But it doesn't come cheap, such an investment will cost in the region of £60m, but Tiscali hopes to reclaim this by providing not only broadband services, but also telephony and TV in the near future.

Tiscali have become the latest in a long line of ISP's to announce it's new 2Mbps offering.

The new package will cost £19.99 per month and comes with a 15GB monthly download limit, although extra capacity can be purchased for £1.50 for each additional GB. The usual free modem and installation is also included.

Customers also have the option of signing up for its combined 2Mbps SmartTalk broadband and telephone package, which allows an increased 20GB download allowance and free weekend phone calls for the same price as the broadband only package.
Other products in Tiscali's range have also benefited, the 512Kbps package has dropped from £19.99 to £15.99 a month, but come with a new 30GB monthly usage limit.

Existing customers can upgrade to the 2Mbps service without charge if their line will support the higher speed.

Tiscali is offering quality of service (QoS) guarantees for it's ADSL broadband for VoIP which were announced back in February.

Lance Spencer, product director for business services at Tiscali, said that traditional leased lines were far too expensive for most companies to use them to connect to remote offices and home workers, but Tiscali's QoDSL service provides an alternative for "low-cost, cost-effective, low-volume data applications".

Through the introduction of  Cisco MPLS technology and Tiscali's own traffic management tools applications such as VoIP, teleworking, extranet connections,  and voice conferencing, can be given priority over other less urgent business applications such as web browsing and e-mail.

Spencer said that if  performance falls below an agreed quality level then the price of that month's service would be refunded. "It is effectively a money-back guarantee, but we do not expect to have to pay out," he suggested.

The free speed upgrade for Tiscali users which we announced back in January is rumoured to be falling behind schedule.

The problem apparently is with the 128Kbps 'broadband' users who were promised a free upgrade to 256Kbps, but due to unspecified "technical constraints" this appears to to be happening.

There has been no word from Tiscali as to when the upgrade will be possible.

At the end of last year PlusNet moved those who used excessive bandwidth to a separate pipe, Tiscalli have gone further and are removing 500 users who overstep the mark.
The bandwidth "hogs" as Tiscalli call them have been ordered leave, but can do so without penalty.

It's claimed that these users regularly download between 30 and 150GB per month, as opposed to the average of 1GB for the rest of it's customer base, resulting in 1% of users using 30% of it's total bandwidth.
Tiscali UK has recently changed its Ts&Cs and issued a warning all 350,000 broadband users that they now have a 30 Gig a month allowance.

It is also revising the advertising campaigns, removing the word 'Unlimited' although it claims "for most customers their experience will that of an unlimited service".

Who will be the next ISP to target heavy users? Time will tell...

All change at Tiscalli with any existing users being offered the chance to upgrade for free to the next speed in the product range. This means an existing user on a 512Kbps connection can upgrade to 1Mbps for no extra cost.
Whether this is because it's slower 'broadband' services are becoming unpopular is uncertain, but recent price cuts by many ISP's leave the tiscalli products looking both slow and overpriced. 

Tiscalli boss Steve Horley claims that they are the only ISP offering broadband for £15.99, although 256Kbps isn't really broadband, and there are other ISP's offering 'proper' broadband for that price.
For example Metronet offer a 2Mbps connection for £15.96, although it is a PAYG service.

Rumours circulating at the moment are suggesting that Tiscali are about to stop selling 'usage-based' broadband services.

The services were only launched in April of this year with a cap of either 1GB of data or 50 hours of time online per month, users who exceed this were charged at 2p/Mb or 2p/Min until a £50 limit was reached.
At the time Tiscali called the packages "groundbreaking", but obviously punters thought otherwise!! One of the problems has been the ever falling cost of a 512k connection, with unmetered services for less that the £19.99 capped Tiscali offering.

Existing customers on the useage based package can continue to use the service as normal, the question is, why would they!!

Ofcom, acting it its role of "TV regulator" (using powers inherited from the Independent Television Commission) have issued a ruling, in which they criticize Tiscali's recent TV adverts for their broadband service.(PDF link)

Issue
A series of commercials promoted Tiscali Broadband as providing high speed internet packages. Four viewers considered this misleading as their experience was of a frequently slow internet access speeds.

Response
Tiscali explained that it routinely upgraded its network and Virtual Paths (VP). Earlier in the year it carried out significant multiple upgrades to improve the service.

However, despite confirmation to the contrary, Tiscali discovered that the company carrying out the work on their behalf had only completed approximately three quarters of the VP upgrades. This was not discovered until 30 April, two weeks after the advertising campaign had finished. The remaining upgrades were completed by 5 May.

Decision
We appreciate that the reason some customers experienced a slow internet connection did not become clear until the advertising had finished. Nonetheless, while the commercials were on air, Tiscali had received a number of customer complaints itself and was therefore aware of a problem. As the service could not be supplied everywhere, Tiscali ought to have removed or qualified the advertisement until it was able to fully supply the claimed ilhigh speed internetlm access. We found the advertising in breach of Advertising Standards Code Rule 5.1 (Misleading advertising)

Things are not going as planned in the Tiscali camp.

The ISP had recently announced that it was to offer a 1Mbps package which would be available at the "beginning of April", but as the more alert of you will realise it's now past that date!

The planned offering was to be based on the BT Wholesale Datastream service, where users can connect to the Tiscali network, and to the IPstream where this wasn't available, with prices of £29.99 and £34.99 respectively. This pricing is in line with most other 1Mbps offerings from several ISP's, and would include a free modem and set-up.

According to Tiscali the reason to delay the launch until the start of June is that it wants to wait until the outcome of the ongoing Ofcom investigation into the pricing structure and migration between the 2 BT Wholesale offerings.

Tiscali have announced three new services which will launch later this spring.

The first one is a basic 1Mb service which at £29.99 per month seems good value when compared to it's main rivals, AOL (£34.99) and BT Yahoo! (£40.99), although details of any usage or download caps have not been announced. Also as it is based on BT Wholesale's Datastream service it will only be available to 80% of current broadband users.

The two new 512Kb connections have usage limits applied to them which may deter take-up, but both packages are priced at a respectable £19.99 per month.

The first is capped to 1GB per month (32MB/day) which is similar to the recently announced BT Broadband basic, but those who exceed these limits will be charged 2p for each additional MB to a maximum of £50 for the month.

The second package is restricted to 50 hours of usage per month, again if you exceed this you will be charged at 2p per minute. It remains to be seen if they advertise this as an 'always on' connection!

Tiscali are positive about the new ackages.

We at UK-Bug are not so impressed.

There have been a noticeable number of packages recently, which rather then expand the broadband experience, impose limitations on usage or offer reduced connection speeds.
While Tiscali and Supanet are the main culprits it's worrying that BT have joined them, hopefully it's not a sign of the direction broadband in Britain is heading.

Tiscali is to offer VoIP and a video-on-demand service to its residential customers across Europe. The company plans to start the roll out its service for VoIP calls in Italy in September, with a video-on-demand offering to follow by the end of 2004. This is also scheduled to be operational across the UK by the end of this year.

Ticalli plan to serve TV programmes with its video-on-demand service as well as other video content using a broadband connection. The firm has chosen to work with NetCentrex to provide the technology based on it's MyCall VoIP service.

Tiscalli was also upbeat about the prospect.

Olivier Hersent, Chairman/CEO of NetCentrex

VoIP seems to be the upcoming technology at the moment and this move follows BT's recent offering of  VoIP services.

In Europe that is!!

In February Tiscali reports to have 1 million ADSL subscribers throughout Europe, quite an increase in it's having 840,000 ADSL customers at the end of last year. This was an astounding increase by 40% during Q4 2003. During the first four weeks of 2004, the number of ADSL customers grew by an average of 35,000 per week, 77% more than the weekly average in Q4 2003.

It didn't mention and specific country data, or if the majority of the increase were on connections of less than 512Kbps. Anything less than this speed is not regarded as broadband by most people, even though Ofcom regard it as such.

Following the recent announcement here on bug , Tiscalli have started to advertise their limited rate "Broadband" services. Coming in both a 150kbps and a 256kbps flavour, they are describing it as "affordband". This may be as a result of the recent uproar over naming it 'broadband'.

Installation for the 150kbps service is free with a modem, but £25 for the 256kbps.

Considering that there are real Broadband services available from less that £20 per month, how Tiscalli intend to market these services successfully is yet to be seen. There may be some attraction for the 150kbps service, for those with a regular "Anytime" connection, but the 256kbps is in a broadband 'no-mans land'.

Full details for the services are <a target="_BLANK" , href=http://www.tiscali.co.uk/products/broadband/build/index.html?code=ZZ-NL-11XY>Here.

Back in early October, we <a href="http://www.uk-bug.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=77" target="_blank"">reported about Tiscali's new 150Kbps broadband product. Since Tiscali's announcement, the Italian ISP has come under flak from industry rivals, claiming that Tiscali's lower speed offering, could be ruining the definition of "broadband".

However, at the very same time as ISPs were crying foul of Tiscali's new lower speed broadband product, many ISPs are now calling for BT to provide wholesale offerings for themselves to market accordingly.

<a href="http://www.netimperative.com" target="_blank"">NetImperative.com today report that a statement issued just two weeks ago by BT Yahoo saying "For clarity, BT's definition of broadband is a connection of 500kbps or more.", has been withdrawn by BT chief broadband officer Alison Ritchie.

"I have been asked many times to define what broadband means and my answer has always been it's what our customers decide it to be. At the end of the day, it's consumers who will decide whether they want a 128, 256, 512kpbs or 1 or 2 Mbps" said Ritchie. The BT CEO further denounced 128kbps as "a midband service not a broadband one", seemingly as a direct comment to NTL's 128k cable offering.

Zen Internet are also quoted to be considering the launch of a 128k or 150k service citing sufficient demand for lower speed connectivity.

Tiscali have launched a 150k 'broadband' service for £15.99 a month and a £25 connection fee, but they provide you with a free modem.

This is an addition to their range of products which also include a 256K and 512K connection.

While most ISP's seem to be increasing broadband speeds Tiscali seem to be going the other way. It's just a matter of time before they launch 56K broadband ;)

The Italian ISP Tiscali, has detailed plans of a "part time" ADSL service.

Mary Turner, the newly promoted Managing Director said that plans to introduce a 'mid range' broadband package is under development, costing less than Tiscali's current broadband offerings costing either £19.99 for a 256Kbps service, or £27.99 or a 512Kbps service.

Tiscali aims to introduce a lower priced package to appeal to a wider userbase, taking advantage of the fact that many broadband enabled home connections are left transmitting a low amount of data whilst subscribers are in work, or school.

A similar tactic is employed by Bulldog - with Primetime products aimed at home users that use more bandwidth during [business] off-peak times.

From initial suggestions, any 'Mid Range' product launched by Tiscali could possibly launch packages that give customers broadband for a much lower price but may not be available 24/7 or may not provide as high bandwidth as normal packages do.

Turner said, ""We're looking at what the market really wants from broadband. At the moment, for a lot of people, the price for broadband doesn't stack up, yet the benefits do; we want to take advantage of this".

Where Tiscalis part time broadband service might succeed is not through price, but through availability. With a limited number exchanges from which Bulldog service their Primetime packages , Tiscali's product availability would have a greater pentetration potential.

Tiscali will also soon announce an agreement with WH Smith that will see the high street retailer distributing both broadband and narrowband access in its 750 stores nationwide.