Tiscali seems to stay in news by all means and this time it's in reply to the article published on the ISPReview website, which precise comments like 'You are downloading too much'. Those words were clearly targeted at the so called drop in the consumer complains about their slow internet connection, as compared to last year but then suddenly even this year these complain have started to bounce back on Tiscali's reputation as an ISP. People seems to have slow downloads and latency in there browsing experience. Especially the online gamers who seems be in pain when their internet broadband connection freaks out.

As per the published article, The Tiscali spokeswoman told ISPReview: "We operate a contention ratio of less than 20:1 and some of these users are downloading over 150 GB a month. The industry average figure for a broadband user downloading is 1.85Gb a month so 30x times this is in excess of 50 GB, which is well above the limit Wanadoo has set for its top 1Mb product (30 GB)."

A ratio of 20:1 sounds very interesting for an ISP like Tiscali and a lot can be done with this kind of monthly bandwidth. The main reason of such a criticism where a consumer was going good with the service level which went down do to accommodate some more heavy-duty subscribers who tends to utilize their broadband connection to extreme causing a congestion of traffic at Tiscali's server causing side-effects like slow download speed and latency in browsing. There DataStream network has taken most of the beating by jumping straight up to 80% of the BT network bandwidth which goes across 20:1 ratio. Actually the main BT wholesale service runs at a contention rate of 50:1 which is no way near to Tiscali's 20:1. We would normally expect Tiscali to rent the backhaul of minimum 2 Mbps for over 100 customers with somewhere like 0.5 Mbps which normally flattens out so badly during the day to the extent that they fell short on their commitment to every consumer for a specific bandwidth rate.

In the past Tiscali have tried various fair systems which don't look like are running anymore due to rise in the bandwidth demand. They are using bandwidth caps or not are also not clear but it certainly looks like some users with high download requirement have experienced latency during peak hours. ISP's do tend to handle their bandwidth in a way to avoid running at 100% utilization all the time, which might just incur more packet loss conditions with latency.

According to Tiscali, their total consumers download is recorded at 150 GB per month, at 0.5 Mbps per consumer and with 31 days in a month, this figure jumps up to amazingly 155 GB.

This is a fact that not every residential broadband is made to run for the money every single day. There are many such home users with shared broadband connections due to their limited bandwidth requirements. Every Internet Service Provider desires to get a major portion of cake every time for which they tend to use tricks to attract more and more users either by reducing their prices or by capping existing connection to accommodate more new connections ignoring the fact that many people would now go online at the same time causing network congestion.