I joined Pipex at the end of August 2006. I moved to my current address in July 2006 previously having been with Virgin at my old address. I managed without internet access for a month before registering with Pipex by telephone. It transpires that this has been the single biggest mistake that I have made in a long time.

The initial telephone call I made to set up the service was fine, the lady was most efficient, I must admit I was impressed. From there, things took a turn for the worse. After the initial 7 day waiting period, my line was activated (at the very end of August 2006) and I received the setup letter detailing my mail set up and modem setup. Unfortunately, the usernames etc quoted in this letter were all shown in uppercase, which was wrong - they should have been shown in lowercase. I spent hours messing around with the setup thinking I must be bonkers until I accessed the mypipex service using a neighbours connection and realised they had misinformed me. I rang and complained and after several disconnections and recorded messages telling me that they were experiencing high call volumes, I finally managed to speak to someone who couldn't really care less. After all, why should they give a stuff about my wasted hours?

Now that I had managed to logon to my Pipex broadband service, I realised that there was a speed issue - I was only getting transfer rates of approximately 3-4k per second - slower than dial-up. I sent 15 emails to various departments and only received 1 coherent reply - coherent, but useless. I spent hours on the telephone, speaking to various people and had to tolerate waits of up to an hour, even at what you would expect to be the less busy periods in the working day. I kept getting the same response each time I spoke to people, check your equipment blah blah blah. I had, of course already done this, and tried various modems/routers, plugged directly into the master socket.

I complained about the delays in getting to speak to people, the fact that my service was still not working, that emails were never answered, return calls promised were never received - I must have been promised around 10 times that somebody would call me back - the calls NEVER came. All I kept getting was the same response 'Sorry, we are terribly busy and we are recruiting and training new staff as we speak'. That still didnt help, neither did speaking to managers etc.

This carried on for best part of a month, until the last week or two of September until I went beserk. I ranted on the phone to a manager (after several hours of trying to get through, being cut off, being told to ring back later by the patronising Pipex voice, having to listen to the patronising Pipex voice saying "Save time - change online" - well I bloody would if my connection wasn't so slow), and the following day a BT engineer attended my house, allegedy changed my master socket and said it would be all okay in 24 hours after the adaptive rate system had settled down. Like hell, I was still only getting downstream of 3-4k per second at best - if that.

At this point I raised the matter to a higher level on my agenda - on a Friday evening - the last in September 2006, I managed to get through to Pipex customer services and threatened to be at their premises to meet and greet the staff on their way into work on the Saturday morning unless somebody sorted this mess out - I had wasted hours of my life, loads of my money on calls etc. They spoke to BT whilst I was on the phone. I think there was a fault at exchange level, BT clearly did something, as by 8.15am the following morning (the Saturday), I was actually getting a normal speed!

It is a shame it took a threat of violence to get this far. Now this is where it gets worse.

I use P2P (torrents) to download game updates and my coursework videos and I can only get download rates of between 1k per second and 25k per second. I have spoken to Pipex about this and they say that they throttle back these connections to ease network traffic, and cannot opt me out of this.

How dare they? I have a 15gb per month download allowance, surely I should be able to 'spend' this however I please?
I have been told that to leave their service, I should pay the remainder of the 12 months contract!

How should I play this? I cannot tolerate this company any longer! Answers on a postcard please!

Apologies for the rambling post, but I am absolutely incensced to the point I am thinking about buying a domain along the lines of pipexsuck.co.uk, setting up a forum, and hopefully deterring new users.......