I have just received this info from another ASDL forum member and I'm posting it in case anyone else wants to complain personally to directors of Pipex. Peter Dubens is the Chairman. I want Mike Read's address too - he is the Executive Director - but it looks as if I'll have to pay for it.

(address moderated)

I continue to read horrendous posts about Pipex. I think it is criminal that they have continued all theses months to sell their Anytime phone package with broadband, when all along they know it is still not available. Surely this is againstl the law? Here is another post I found yesterday. :

I too would love to leave Pipex. I've been with them since the 5th of August. The following is an email I sent them last Monday, no reply as yet.

"Dear Sir/Madam,

Since migrating to Pipex I have had nothing but trouble. My previous connection was rock solid for several years, Pipex haven't managed to maintain a continuous connection for 2 days so far. In no particular order my complaints about the service are as follows:

1) It took nearly 3 weeks before I could connect to Pipex and browse the Internet. Without going into too much detail, the problem lay entirely with Pipex, yet the blame was laid with BT for the first ten days, then with my own machine and then when Pipex finally did acknowledge it was a Pipex problem it took over a week to resolve.
2) In trying to resolve this I have spent many hours in queues, costing me at least £30 in phonecalls
3) When I have managed to get through (3 attempts to call on 3 separate days were met with a recorded message) support has been severely lacking, with no clear escalation procedure, and no continuity between support personnel (being asked to run the same tests time and time again is VERY frustrating)
4) Pipex provides a 24/7 service, it even defines peak periods as being up to midnight. Yet it's customer support is only available during very restrictive hours.
5) Whilst trying to resolve my initial connection problems I was promised several call backs, only one of which was forthcoming. Support emails took a long time for a response and I am STILL waiting for a response to my last email.
6) During peak periods I can expect to be disconnected at least once every two hours. This is quite frankly appalling.
7) One of the main uses for my broadband connection is gaming. I find myself constantly being dumped off servers whilst trying to play. The main culprit is World of Warcraft. It is probably worth noting that being an MMORPG and having three friends also playing from Sheffield at the same time (with no connection issues) it is highly unlikely to be a problem with the game itself (Certainly there were no problems with onetel)
8) In addition to the poor performance in games, I find that anything relying on a continuous connection is constantly having to resync, streaming radio spends a significant amount of its time recaching.
9) Since 8 o'clock last night I have been unable to connect (since being once more unceremoniously dumped from WoW) receiving error 721 on each of my attempts to connect. Tonight after a long day at work (ironically helping people connect to the Internet) I will have to go home and call Pipex. Of course there is absolutely no help on the Pipex website, nor are there any reported outages.
10) I have yet to notice any money taken from my account, yet I am quite impressed to see 3 invoices in my account, I'm not sure about some of the charges there, but I can't be bothered to call because it will end up costing me more time and money. This is the kind of feeling your levels of Customer Service has engendered.
11) And finally, I fully understand that despite being advertised as an 8Mb service it is dependant on several factors the speed you will actually get. Your online speed test predicted 5.5Mb and I usually get 4Mb (as the trained line speed). However, downloads from my own webserver, which I know to be capable of at least 4MB per second (that's bytes not bits) rarely get to 400Kb/s, usually hovering at around 200Kb/s

So it looks like I've spent £100 moving from a perfectly reliable connection at 2Mb to an incredibly poor connection with a negligible speed increase. And having being with Pipex for 40 days I've actually been online for less than 50% of that time.

So what would I like to do now?

What I'd really like is for somebody to take some responsibility for this awful service, and put some effort into responding to my complaint. I would like a response to all of the above issues, and compensation for my time and effort. I would like a prompt and comprehensive response, my three emails from Pipex to date have all started with "Apologies for the delay" with the exception of one which started "Appologies for the delay" (with "Apologies" being Pipex's favourite word you'd think it would actually be spelt right...) Basically I'd like somebody to prove to me that Pipex is a company worth dealing with.

If this cannot be done then I would like a MAC code and a full refund. In all honesty this would be my preferred option right now.

If this cannot be done then I will be pursuing the matter with CISAS.

re your letter to the chief exec. i doubt if he will even get to see it . i had a similar problem with sky some years ago and wrote to the chief exec at his home address .result problem fixed within days ,even the sky personel wondered how i had got action so fast

I’m in a somewhat similar situation.

I’ve been a Pipex customer for the best part of 4 years. During this time I was living with my parents. I have since bought a house of my own and decided I’d take advantage of the Pipex MAX plus Anytime Calls package.

This package according to the Pipex website gives me:

- upto 8mb broadband
- free local and national calls 24/7*365 days a year

So I went ahead and signed up, taking into account the good service I’d received from Pipex over the years, despite several advising me to go elsewhere as Pipex had gone down hill, I chose to ignore I trust my past experience with the company.

Anyway, I signed up for the package, plain and simple. No extra software or hardware - I didn’t need it, I had it all anyway. We went ‘live’ on the 21/09/06. At first I had a truly awful connection. Randomly dropping in and out, slow connection, slow download speed. After running some tests, the best I was getting from this ‘upto 8mb’ connection was 1mb - AT BEST! More often then not, it was below this.

After a bit of research, I discovered that for a period of 10days after connection to ADSL MAX your connection is ‘training’ and thus these speed fluctuations and disconnections are normal. I had also e-mailed Pipex about this and they confirmed the same.

So I plodded along. I’m now halfway through my ‘training’ period and STILL the best I am geting is a poor
The second part of my story is regarding the 'Anytime' calls part of the deal. I have heard NOTHING from Pipex regarding this. No documentation, no phone call, no e-mail - nothing. I have sent several e-mails regarding this to Pipex Customer Services and despite me geting replies back to other e-mails from them, they seem to be ignoring this issue. My calls at present, are still be charged by BT when I could have been enjoying free calls had Pipex delivered.

Lastly, I went online to check my first invoice and to my suprise an extra charge of £29.99 for Zone Alarm Security Suite was there! This despite me in the sign up process, specifically requesting none of the extra software nor hardware - as I already had the hardware. But to add insult to injury, they've charged me for Zone Alarm but haven't even sent the software out to me (not that I want it nayway).

I have now sent a letter of complaint to Pipex giving them a period of 14 days to deliver the services I ordered, refund that £29.99 or else I will be cancelling my direct debit and requesting my contract with Pipex be terminated due to them breaching it.

My next course of action is to log a complaint against Pipex with Trading Standards and the ISPA.

Pipex are evidently in big trouble. I cannot understand what is going on with them. They are busy buying out other ISP's and taking on their customers yet they do not have the staff to deal with customers nor the systems in place to correctly bill customers.

People will be leaving in droves. Steer well clear of Pipex is my advice. Do not touch them with a bargepole.

Good luck with the letter Curlew - I'm sure some of our other forum members will be more than interested to hear what kind of response you get back from this.

Cheers

Jason Lloyd

Other people who have been terribly messed around by Pipex might want to write to the head man. I thought it might be helpful if I tell you the name and address. This is the letter I will post soon:


Mike Read
Chief Executive
Pipex
1 Triangle Business Park
Stoke Mandeville
Buckinghamshire
ENG HP22 5BL


Dear Mr Read,

I am writing to let you know how deeply dissatisfied I have become since joining your Pipex Start and Anytime service in July.

You advertised my package to consist of a £6.50 broadband section and a £12.50 Anytime section. It included free antivirus software for a year plus free modem and free connection.

Here are my major complaints:

1. When I joined Pipex on July 14th your representative DID NOT TELL ME that the Anytime phone package was unavailable. Two months later I am STILL WAITING for this service to be connected .

2. My online invoices show that you have charged £14.99 per month for the broadband section as if I had signed up for the 'broadband only' service, which I hadn't. Also you have charged £20 for the modem , £20 for the DSL connection and £5 for the unavailable antivirus software. Customer Service told me that they would amend my bill but could not alter the £14.99 broadband charge. For this I would have to contact Customer Care. The bill still has not been amended three weeks later.

These are more minor but very irritating complaints:

Your failure to keep me informed has been shameful and I have had to phone Pipex many times, even to ask for my user name and password and also to enquire about the persistently unavailable Anytime service.

1. I sent two emails, including a detailed one outlining my concerns, to Customer Service but NEITHER WAS ANSWERED

2. Only after many calls was I told about Customer Care and their unpublished email address, to which I have now written. It is very frustrating that this department is only contactable by email and there is a ten working day delay in getting a response. I am not holding my breath for a response as I don't expect that there will be one. With my previous ISP- OneTel- if I had a problem, I was immediately put in touch with someone with the authority to sort out the problem.

When I entered into a contract with you on an 14th July I expected the terms of that contract to be honoured, both by receiving the services and by being invoiced correctly for them. If you can’t fulfil these terms I will be forced to part company with you and change to a reliable company

Sincerely,

I've just had this post, among many others, on ASDL guide in reply to my BEWARE PIPEX letter. It just proves that I knew already, that Pipex are still continuing to advertise and sell their Anytime phone package even though it hasn't been available for some months Unbelievable!
If you study the Pipex section on ASDL you will find lots of disgruntled customers, not all of whom have subscribed to Anytime, but who are still disgusted with Pipex Customer Service and the Finance Dept, which seem to be in the habit of billing people for things that were advertised as free, or for oversharging for other things. Talking to Customer Services is like taling to a stone wall. They know they are on the wrong but remain really unhelpful or else promise things - such as correcting an obviouly incorrect bill, but then nothing happens! Here is the reply I mentioned earlier:


tonybridge replied to your post at the site: .
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=pipex&Number=2678635

I decided today to upgrade my 2Meg service with Pipex to PipexMAX Anytime, calculating that it would save me about £50 a month over my BT contract. I'm happy with 2Meg, but the Pipex site told me that I could expect up to 5Megs, so I thought 'why not?' (Aside: Pipex-owned Bulldog tell me that I would get no more than a 2Meg connnection...)

While waiting (about 30 minutes...) for someone to answer (actually, the Pipex strategy seems to be to get someone to pick the phone up who actually can't help you, they then say, 'I'll put you through' and then you sit and wait ), I read various threads in this forum, including this one, and I was especially interested in this:

'1.They didn't tell me at the time of contract that the phone package wasn't available.'

After eventually getting to speak to a real person, we had almost completed the transaction when I asked if the Anytime free calls were actually available. 'Mumble mumble' came the reply. Me: 'sorry?' Him: 'Well, they'll be available in a couple of weeks, sir' Me: 'That's definite, is it?' Him: 'That's our estimation, Sir' Me: 'But you've been advertising the service for months.' Him:'It's taken a while to get the service up and running, Sir' Me:'Goodbye'

You couldn't make it up...

Incidentally, in the course of our conversation, I asked him why Anytime (free calls anytime) costs £24.99, while Hometime (free calls evening and weekends only) costs £27.99. He was suitably embarrassed :0

I'm not normally a Pipex-knocker, having had nothing but a rock-solid connection for about 8 years, but this is my first dealing with CS, and it doesn't fill me with confidence for the future...

Curlew

Thanks for your email, this seems very surprising given that PIpex do have a better record for customer service than many other ISP's. If you look at ADSL Guide they're usually up near the top in terms of reliability and customer service.

Has anyone else had a similar experience with Pipex? Particularly since their recent new ad campaign with David Hasselhoff?

Cheers

Jason Lloyd

I joined Pipex in July with a broadband/ Anytime contract. It was advertised as a £6.50 broadband and £12.50 phone call package, with free connection, free modem and free antivirus.
I have a catalogue of complaints against Pipex:
1. They didn't tell me that the phone package wasn't available.
2. It still isn't available 2 months later, even though they aresstill advertising it..
1,They didn't send me my username or password by either email or letter, as they promised they would.
2. I have had to phone them continually on an 0845 number, where part of the cost of the call is paid to Pipex, and where I often had at least 10 minute waits to be connected, just to find out what on earth was happening over the past 2 months, .
3.Customer services were not very helpful and were unsilling to pass me on to someone higher up, like a Team Leader.
4.When I looked at my online bills ( they still haven't set up my direct debit after 2 months) they had over £55 on them which shouldn't have been there. Pipex had billed me for the dsl connection, the modem and the antivirus, all of which were advertised as free. The anitvirus is still unavailable from their website. In addition they had billed my broadband at £14.99, which is the charge when one receives the broadband service alone. It should have been £6.50, as this was what it was advertised as within the package I bought.
5. I sent a long email of complaint a month ago to their Customer Services but it was never answered. After reading various posts on the ASDL forum I find that they have 3000 unanswered emails for August alone.
After reading that someone who was wrongly billed for £60 had to ring them 3 times per week for six weeks to get his money back I have cancelled my direct debits and am about to send them a 14day 'time is of the essence' letter, as recommended to me by Trading Standards, as they have broken their contract with me, and with lots of other people I suspect.
A few other posts on the ASDL forum indicate that Pipex' finance dept. is in a 'meltdown', so I am not holding my breath for them to rectify my bill. I rang them about it and they put me on hold while they said they were talking to the finace dept. They then said it was rectified, but 10 days later the incorrect bill appears unchanged online. This sort of thing, from what I have read, seemsquite usual with Pipex.
If anyone wants to join them after reading this, they must be masocistic or mad. I have been in touch with other people who are in the same position as me and we can't wait to get out, sooner rather than later. Pipex is obviously in a real mess and the customer doesn't exactly come first in this situation as far as I have experienced.