I was also with Tiscali which then moved to TalkTalk. I have to admit, since Tiscali was bought by TalkTalk I amsure my internet experience has not been as good.
I find my computer is so slow at the start of every internet connection. IE8 is worse than Firefox on my computer. I am not sure if the problem is down to my computer or not. It is supposed to be on "upto 8Mb", but never goes above 3.8Mb The computer itself is about 9 years old I guess. Pentium 3 processor, MMX gforce graphics card - not much else to brag about other than those.
The thing is, I have not really changed how I have used my computer over the years. I've always done the youtube sites, Ebay, MSN etc through this computer and never had an issue. Just seems recently the poor thing needs an extra 5 minutes by itself these days to log online and prepare me a home page screen.