This is a temporary page until I get my raging emotions in order and compose myself better :)
...but simply put, Demon Internet UK sucks, and this is after being a long-suffering customer for over 2 years (after swiching from Pipex after they started "traffic shaping" BitTorrent to 20KBps)
This also applies to THUS in general, but I'm targeting Demon specifically because they've somehow gone from being the longest-standing UK ISP and respected by many in the IT field to a cesspit of incompetence, especially in the field of customer service
These are some of the main problems I've had with Demon Internet
Demon outsourced their technical support to an unspecified Indian subcontinent nation, most likely India (going by the accents), they aren't even honest to give their real names when answering the phone. Seeming as everyone's outsourcing their call-centres to India it doesn't seem so bad, but to add insult to injury they kept their sales team in the UK.
Their support seems understaffed and underqualified too. One time I phoned them in 2005 to ask about their compliance with proposed legislation requiring ISPs to "log everything". As soon as I stated my question the Indian woman at the other end hung up straight away. I phoned up again straight after but was on hold for well over half an hour, I gave up.
Check out this "Demon Text-Chat Live" discussion I had about the recent censorship of Wikipedia by the IWF, with which Demon was entirely complicit: (There was a wait of about 20 minutes before the discussion began, and it takes about a minute for each reply to be received, making this conversation a lot longer than it looks.)
Connected To: Demon Text-Chat Live
David has joined the session
Connected to chat server, an agent will be with you shortly
Jack has joined the session
David: (Broadband connection) IWF censorship, false-positives, and account cancellation
Jack: Hello, welcome to Demon Helpdesk, you are through to Jack. Please may I take your hostname?
David: **********.demon.co.uk
Jack: thank you, how can i help you..?
David: I'm concerned at Demon/THUS's unquestioning take-up of the IWF blacklist service
David: I have encountered numerous false-positives
David: at this very moment the IWF has decided to blacklist sections of wikipedia. There is an ungoing discussion of the matter at Reddit.com at this very moment.
David: I find this unacceptable. I did contact Demon earlier about it (when Demon's IWF filter blocked Archive.org) saying I would like to cancel if it happened again
Jack: do u get bounce back mail s while you try to send emails?
David: no, I phoned them
Jack: have you tried followin the link in your bouce back emails, and update your contact details
David: uhm this is not about emails
David: when did I ever say I had an email problem?
David: this is about IWF filtering and internet censorship
I waited about 15 minutes here
David: hello?
Jack: i'm here, we are aware the issue that some of the non Demon server are recjecting emails , since some of the Ip adresses are blacklisted on their servers, we are trying to contact them and get the ip's removed from the black listed one's..
David: Email?
David: this is web censorship
Jack: do you have a domain with demon? if yes can you give the domain name?
David: "****.demon.co.uk" ...but it's my world-wide-web service that Demon is applying censorship to. Not my email system. I have my own email servers.
Jack: allright ! you are talking about the content blockin over world wide web..
It took about an hour to get here, at this point "Jack" seemed to get a grasp of the situation. He could reproduce the issue at his end but denied it was an IWF problem (even though I could access the page fine with my Global Crossing connection).
Sometime around December 6th the IWF's filter (the UK's child pornography filter) decided to block the "Virgin Killer" article on Wikipedia. Whilst it's up for debate about whether the album art (a photo of a naked prepubescent girl in a provocative pose) is 'illegal' or not, the IWF decided to block it anyway, so then all the ISPs that subscribe to the list blocked access, including Virgin Internet and numerous BT-related ISPs. I take up issue with this: this wikipedia entry was deliberately blocked the IWF with zero oversight, it is not exploitive child pornography with intent to titilate,
The IWF filter is arbitrary, no-one besides IWF employees and partner ISPs can see the list, and they do not inform site administrators if their sites have been blocked. There is no public oversight.
In principle I am against Internet censorship, but in this case I might let it pass since it has value. But I do recognise the 'thin end of the wedge' arguments.
Demon itself has implementation issues with the filter. Besides unquestioningly using the IWF's list, it also has the nasty habit of generating false-positives when you send out too many HTTP requests to Archive.org's Waybackmachine. Sometime in mid-2008 I was browsing a waybacked archive of Microsoft.com and a few other sites, because I used a tabbed browser I loaded up all the revisions in different tabs. Occasionally a tab would contain Demon's IWF "We're not saying much, but you might just be a paedophile" page. When I reloaded those tabs the error page went away.
In this respect you could say Demon is slightly better than the other UK ISPs that implement the censorship blacklist: at least they inform the customer it's been blocked. Other ISPs like Virgin Media do not and just present a generic error page (with incorrect HTTP status codes, which is amusing and rings of pathetic censorship attempts in third-world nations with depotic regimes).
Whilst moving to Demon from Pipex was an improvement (at least at the time, and without any TV adverts with 'The Hoff' in them either) I've been paying in excess of £24 every month for a 2048/256kbps connection when my area is 8192/384kbps-ready. Apparently Demon has supported 8mbps since 2005 but I've been a customer from 2006.
I contacted Demon about this issue numerous times in 2005 and 2006, none of my calls or emails were replied and I was never issued with a case number.
I was wondering if anyone can recommend any UK ISPs that don't suck. My definition of 'not sucking' is that they meet the following criteria:
If you know of any, please contact me.
Update 2008-12: A few people have informed me of ADSL24, who seem to be a pretty competent broadband provider. Only catch is the low monthly transfer limits for what you pay, but I doubt I'd break those limits so I might consider switching to them from Demon. It's pretty cool how they give everyone 8 IP addresses as standard (if only I had a modem/router that supported that).
Update 2009-05: I switched to ADSL24 in late December of last year and so far everything has been great with them. I chose the account where you get a 30GB download limit during peakhours, otherwise it's unmetered which is fine. Customer service is responsive and to the point so I've no real complaints. The statistics features they provide are useful too.