I have (I will be stopping as soon as I can) my business broadband with Pipex. I thought this year that paying £60+ per month was too much (for about 8 computers) for hosting my webspace and some primitive e-mail arrangements. I'm nervous about these things so I have been putting it off. I rang Pipex to see if I could amalgamate two old accounts into one. I found out (pleasant surprise) that they could provide a 16 times faster service for £14.50 per month ('Business Light'). This is much better, of course, so I thought that I would take it on the chin that I have been paying over the odds for years. I did wonder, by the way, why they didn't want to look after their customers (I've been with them for 10 years) instead of playing them for a fool. Leaving that aside, so far so good. They changed it straight away - Technical Services were good. There was a different technical issue about hosting my company's domain name which meant I needed reassurance that e-mail and hosting would continue OK. This just needed a phone with a person who was going to take responsibility. I had to ring through their ghastly phone system that didn't give me an option that matched my needs. This is OK once or twice, but the 12th time ... (I am running ahead of my story). But Technical Services don't deal with hosting, so I had to e-mail 'Probusiness' and 'Domains', who don't have phone numbers because, I was told, they are 'not client-facing'. I asked in my e-mail for someone to ring me and for confirmation by e-mail they had received my request. Anticipating non-reply, I asked the Customer Services person what to do if they didn't reply; she said ring Customer Services if they didn't reply within 48 hours. No reply; I rang Customers Services, spoke to a different person (or course) who said that I shouldn't contact Probusiness but should speak to 123.reg. I range 123.reg: they can't deal with Pipex-hosted domain names. I rang Customer Services - who can I complain to? They said e-mail the Complaints department; I e-mailed them; automated reply. The next I heard I had an e-mail to say that they were sorry I wanted to leave and that my broadband service would be cut off by the end of January - even though I have paid until the end of 2009. They don't give a direct phone number; when I rang the one they gave me (their standard 'Customer Services' number) they hadn't even heard of the woman who said my broadband service would be cut off - so here's me trying to complain about the complaints service. One bright spark: one bloke, Andy in Customer Services, has shown an interest in my problem and has promised to e-mail their Probusiness people to keep my broadband service on while I get ready to transfer everything (without a break) to another company who will host my company's webspace and e-mail/domain name. The moral of this story: if any company wants to keep its customers, it has to take an interest in communicating with them, and not bounce them between departments who don't talk to each other. This is a classic case of NTL-style Kafkaesque corporate paranoia-inducing non-communication. If they can't get this right, what, exactly, are they doing? Shareholders: sell your Tiscali shares now. Broadband users: don't use Pipex.