Robin Good describes in detail his experience with Alice Home TV, the IPTV offering by the italian incumbent Telecom Italia. His experience is really negative.
Here are the main points of his post. Take a look at the full article.
a) They will disable your present ADSL line and activate new circuitry that does not operate according to open standards and that will not support other commercial ADSL modems.
b) They can now effectively deliver up to 8-10 times more bandwidth that you could have used before, but they pre-set their equipment in your home to reserve the majority of this bandwidth to their IPTV channel and video-phone service. You have no way of configuring how that “split” is served and when or how it is activated.
c) They do not care to check, verify or ask whether you are happy or satisfied with the “upgrade” nor to measure whether the bandwidth and connectivity available to you is any better than what you had before.
d) They lock you into a one-year contract, notwithstanding all the false promises they gave you on the phone about you being free of cancelling out of the program anytime or this being a free offer that you could back out from easily during the first few months.
As if that wasn’t enough, consider also the following:
e) No Mac support. With my previous, privately bought Wi-Fi modem, I could support any number of stations at my home including Macs, Linux and PCs. Now, I have a pre-configured max number of users set to five, and my Macs cannot connect to the Wi-FI line. Either I connect them physically to the new modem or they won’t go online.
f) Reset, reset, reset. With the new setup, I need to reset the new ADSL modem at least once a day if not more. When computers go offline and then are switched on again, the modem doesn’t like it too much, and unless you switch it off and then turn it on again, it will not give an Internet line that you can use.
g) Slow. The first and only reason I accepted this offer was because I felt it was my duty to test the most popular home tv system offered by a telco alongwith the promised new high speed ADSL lines. But of the promised speed I have seen really nothing. The bandwidth available to me before and after the upgrade has remained essentially unvaried. No improvement over what was already available to me at a much lower price.
h) Home TV? I haven’t seen any. Fortunately, I was one of the many lucky subscribers who got such bad IPTV service as to start thinking more effectively with his own head. The IPTV channel is a joke: first the bandwidth is not enough and the image is continuously marred by visual jitters and disturbances often accompanied by nasty rumors and sounds. Quality of service is a word unknown to those who have set this program up and I will restrain myself from mentioning the sad show reserved to those expecting access to a film library worth of that name.
j) Uploading speed is a joke. 384 Kbps is all you are given to do your video or FTP uploads. This is just a slap in the face of anyone who wants to get serious broadband deployed in this country. 384 Kbps is the same upload speed I had five or more years ago with any provider out there. Now you offer me a 20Mpps line (really a private IPTV line for you) and the upload channel that comes with it is only 384Kbps? You gotta be kidding or…. as I am afraid this is very much the case… we don’t read your offers and fine print until after we buy and our ignorance and blind-eyed drive to get the best and the latest is going to burn us good this time.
i) No contract, but payment required. I have not signed any contract for this. I have been called over three months ago with the a customer representative promising me a 20Mbps line and an offer to try Alice Home TV and the new video phone technology. I was also guaranteed the ability to cancel the contract anytime. Now, that all of this beauty has been installed at my premises, I have already received the first bill though I have never signed with my hand any contract.
Whit the above premise, we are far from a really usable IPTV offering. On the other hand, Fastweb should be doing much better in Italy, even if I’ve never tried their service. Any comment from Fastweb’s users ?
Technorati Tags: ip tv, iptv, alice home tv, robin good
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