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.