Tiscali forced to reverse software installation after iTunes block

Tiscali has had to order engineers to reverse software installation on its bandwidth-throttling hardware following a number of complaints that iTunes had been blocked during peak hours and traffic had slowed down to an unusable rate. Over the past week there have been reports of blocked ports and sub-dial-up speeds of 10Kbit/s during early evening hours. The problem has been blamed on an upgrade to a Cisco kit which changed rules on its customer fair use policy. Tiscali was one of the first ISPs to put a cap on usage for heavy users. A spokesperson for Tiscali posted on the company support page: "We are aware that there is an issue in this area which currently being addressed. We will post in here when further updates are available. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. As well as having an impact on gaming, this issue is a cause of peak time slow speeds and is currently affecting iTunes access, VPN/FTP/RDP just to mention a few." Tiscali make no secret of their current heavy usage policy, stating that it enforced to protect Tiscali users' bandwidth. However, speculation suggests that heavy usage from excessive downloading, streaming and online gaming puts a big strain on ISP budgets.