Bulldog

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Alan
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Bulldog

Post by Alan » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:34 pm

Hi

I am thinking of (only thinking at the moment) of going with Bulldog as they have enabled my exchange and I can get there 16mb service for the same price as my current 8mb service :)

My current ISP Nildram are starting to feel the effects of the Tiscrappy take over, various issues with email servers and DNS servers :cry: , so I am tentivly looking around.

Anybody have any problems/issues or good words on Bulldog?

Would appreciate any feed back :wink:

Thanks

Alan
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Post by Shotokan101 » Thu Jan 03, 2008 12:13 am

What actual speed will your line support Alan ?
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Post by eMuNiX » Thu Jan 03, 2008 2:15 am

I never had any problems with Bulldog, but being a Pipex company they are now also under the wing of Tiscali so at some point things are going to go pearshaped. I have emails from both Pipex and Bulldog informing that my CS calls will be charged at 5p per minute if I use 'their' service or 10p per minute if I were to use BT calls. I never stayed in the waiting line for Bulldog for more than a few minutes but often for 45 or more with Pipex. Both of the emails say to me that you will now go to the same call centre so expect 20 minute or more on the line before talking to a CS support staff (so £1 or £2 to talk to support as an estimate).

I can only see things degenerating under Tiscali, if you can live with not talking to CS unless it is an emergency then all may be good. If you can get Sky LLU go with that, they are actually quite good.

Final point about Bulldog is that I left them over 6 months ago, we terminated contracts and all was fine. I still owe them a small amount of money, but hey, they have now written to me to tell me that my connection is now suspended......but it was disconnected 6 months ago you fools. Oh and my email account/webmail/webspace from Pipex, who I left 2 years ago is still active (handy throw away email address for my spam :) )
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Alan
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Post by Alan » Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:52 am

Yes would like to go to Sky, but unfortunately not available at my exchange :cry:

@Jim, They haven't said what my estimated speed would be, just that it would be up-to 16mb :?
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Post by Kieran » Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:35 am

Speed wise, do you get 8Mb now, or very close to? If so, what is your SNR? If you have a reasonably high SNR at 8Mb then it is likely you'll be able to go higher speed wise. If you are under 8Mb by a little way and have a close to the wire SNR then you won't see hardly any improvement by upgrading I wouldn't have thought, in which case I'd question if it was worth it.
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Post by Alan » Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:48 am

My 8mb connection now gives me around 4mb, my snr is usually around 15-14.

It doesn't cost that much more for the 16mb to the 8mb though
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Post by Shotokan101 » Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:03 am

Doesn't sound like you'll get much - if any speed increase - so you'd be primarily moving for potential CS benefits and service reliability I guess :?
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Post by Alan » Thu Jan 03, 2008 11:56 am

Hmm may stick it out with Nildram then. Unless the service deteriorates even more, or when the problem start to effect me.

Haven't used their CS since the take over, but before that they was very good.
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Post by Steve » Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:30 pm

From distant past experience, I would never touch bulldog again. THey may have improved but from my dealings with them they have / had:-

THE worst customer service I've ever dealt with...anywhere.
The speed was OK but had outages for prolonged periods of time (weeks??)

After I left them, they kept trying to bill me by direct debit. I ended up instructing my bank not to pay them. 18 month later they tried sending me bills again and threatening e-mails trying to bill me for a service I did not have from them.

Despite calling, writing / emailing them I got nowhere from months and months until finally threatening them with legal action and a bill for my time if they did not get their accounts sorted. They blamed a database error, to which I insisted my details where actually removed from their records not just marked as ex-customer. Finally this did the trick.

This may be a one off. It may have improved by now, and lets face it ALL ISP customer service is bad once they have your money.

Hope you have more luck than I did.

Rant over.

BTW Happy new year to all. I wish you all health and happiness.
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Re: Bulldog

Post by the_flames » Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:31 pm

Alan wrote:Hi

I am thinking of (only thinking at the moment) of going with Bulldog as they have enabled my exchange and I can get there 16mb service for the same price as my current 8mb service :)

My current ISP Nildram are starting to feel the effects of the Tiscrappy take over, various issues with email servers and DNS servers :cry: , so I am tentivly looking around.

Anybody have any problems/issues or good words on Bulldog?

Would appreciate any feed back :wink:

Thanks

Alan
Bulldog is Owned by Pipex, who are owned by Tiscrappy ... they are really taking over. soon it's going to be them, BT and cable :|

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... hack-loopy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15 ... ffshoring/
(pipex and Bulldog)

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/ ... to-tiscali
(pipex and tiscali)


BTW isnt this the Non-Technical free chat :P
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Post by Steve » Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:44 pm

For what it's worth. I'm currently with TalkTalk. Upto 8 meg service. Went through a patch of line dropping / reconnecting a lot in the evenings last year but this has now settled.

Customer service has improved significantly (often you can now get UK or SA based call centres which have been quite good - asian ones not so good, mostly with the language barrier not helping.) It's still scripted answers which do not fit the questions asked, but hey at least I can understand them.

Pricing I must say is excellent. Since it's basically free. £21 pm covers the usual line rental (£14 with BT I think) and a call package which means all my calls to local, national and international numbers are free. As I have family in France my calls would easily make the bill with BT more than £21pm

It's unlimited but presumably has a fair usage policy, which has never caused me any problems even with distros downloads etc (although very little p2p these days)

You could do worse than take a look at them?
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Post by Shotokan101 » Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:26 pm

BTW isnt this the Non-Technical free chat Razz
....doesn't count if your talking about Tiscr@pi :twisted:

...Nothing Technical Going On Here - Move Along ! :lol:
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Post by Alan » Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:22 am

Thanks for all the replies :) Certainly some food for thought.

Talk talk are enabled in my exchange, the only thing putting me off is they now have a 40Gig dl limit, which with 5 users P2Ping is not good. Currently averaging 50gig a month dl. I did talk to them, they said it wouldn't matter if I went over the 40gig, but wouldn't give me any details of how much I could go over the limit or how often I could go over. to be honest that's the only thing stopping me going over to them, as the price is very appealing.

Steve your story about Bulldog is much the same as happened to me years ago with Tiscrappy. Took me ages to get them off my back once I had left them :?
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Post by mstombs » Fri Jan 04, 2008 10:35 am

TalkTalk do impose their cap - but won't reveal the full algorithm (or give you tools to monitor what they see as your usage), but according to posts on broadband forums it seems like they drop your connect speed to 512k and won't reset 'till you phone up to complain.
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Post by Alan » Fri Jan 04, 2008 12:32 pm

mstombs wrote:TalkTalk do impose their cap - but won't reveal the full algorithm (or give you tools to monitor what they see as your usage), but according to posts on broadband forums it seems like they drop your connect speed to 512k and won't reset 'till you phone up to complain.
Wont be TalkTalk then :cry:
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