Hello,

For the past month my 8 Meg line has been working like its the 'dreaded old' dial up. Established websites like Amazon, Ebay and even Google take 5 to 10 minutes to load up and anything hosted outside the UK or wothout UK mirrors doesn't load at all.

If I do the speed checks it tells me I have 7 Meg or 6 Meg or even 8 Meg - but you could have fooled me!!!! I am experiencing the slowest server responses I have ever seen since the dial up days of the late nineties.

I have made repeated calls to their helpline and been taken through the 'technical help'. They asked me to clear all my cookies and cache (ZZzzz...) I was then asked to restart my PC and router (Bound to make a big difference!) - eventually they wanted me to unscrew the phone socket and plug my cabling into the test socket. Sooner or later I had to draw the line on this wild goose chase and tell them the problem is simple. I am connected to the internet at 8 Meg - that's great. But I need their datacentre to respond to my requests and send me the data from the world wide web at a reasonable rate to enjoy my big speeds.

It seems to me Pipex have a bottle neck somewhere in their system, probably in the datacentres and as a result have a massive bottle neck reducing us all (The internet forums are full of similar complaints) to a crummy internet service. I asked for the MAC code from customer services. This allows you to port your service over to another provider. It takes 5 days for them to send you the code both via email and post. (That should tell you something about the speeds of their service.) Once you have the MAC code you can call up an alternative and they will seemlessly move you to a new provider.

My advice would be don't move to Tiscali, they now own pipex. As much as it pains me - I am moving to BT. I think the problem is with the Credit Crunch in full swing, a number of Telco providers are struggling to upgrage infrastructure in time for demand. You need to be with a player that has the redundancy to cope. Unfortunately, that is most likely to be BT.

Good luck RW74

Hi

Even though you are connected at 8mb, it doesn't mean you are receiving 8mb service. The best way to approach Pipex is with proof of speeds over a given time period. If you go to www.speedtest.net you can run a speed test on your line, giving you the "actual" speed you are receiving.

Some ISPs limit the amount you can download per month, I know a friend had his line "throttled" so that he could only download and browse on dial up speeds. Might be worth reading your agreement with Pipex to see if you have gone over that limit, I can pretty much guarantee that they won't tell you about it! I was with Pipex 2 years ago and the customer service was really bad, it took me weeks to cancel and ended up having to send a letter by recorded delivery.

I can impartially recommend o2 broadband, they have the best customer ratings in the UK and if your in the right area, you can get a 20mb connection with no download limit! If you have an o2 phone, you get a discounted rate too!

https://www.o2broadband.o2.co.uk/

Hope that helps somewhat.

Steve

As above speedtest.net is reliable measure so get results from there. Check your MTU settings - http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/tweak2.htm

Check out your exchange to see if any problems - http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/

Support ask you to use the test socket to bypass internal wiring, not wild goose chase.

Get IP profile from http://speedtester.bt.com/

Get line stats from router - http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/frogstats.php

Use opendns for dns settings -https://www.opendns.com/smb/start

If problem with your setup moving ISP will not help.