Well I had a call from a Relationship Manager last night. (I rang and emailed Dana Loftus, the Pipex press relations person, yesterday letting her know that potential bad publicity was in the offing!)

She promised to sort out my account and pay back the overcharges, recalculate my 3 previous bills, connect me to 8MB for the same price I'm paying now within 10 days, give me a free month, and pay me £20 compensation for my trouble.

All to be effective on my December bill.

We'll see.

I asked her why so many problems and she gave me a detailed account.

Summarised, the problems they are having are down to the introduction of a new accounts database, in mid-September,which has been a disaster for them.

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.......

If you change your downloader to UTorrent you can bypass the throttling restrictions that Pipex have inflicted upon us all. I cant remember how but I found it online and now get excellent download rates, even with my crippled "UP TO 8MEG" connection.

hope this helps

Bishop:If you change your downloader to UTorrent you can bypass the throttling restrictions that Pipex have inflicted upon us all. I cant remember how but I found it online and now get excellent download rates, even with my crippled "UP TO 8MEG" connection.

hope this helps

for me none of the encryption works using bit comet, u torrent or azeurus, anyone any idea why?

If you are seriously looking to leave, have you thought of airing your grievance with Ofcom?

Try the press officer, Dana Loftus ... these appears to have worked for me..... though I haven't had my December bill yet.....

http://www.pipex.net/about/media_centre/

"There is a strong structure in place to prevent the floor managers ever having to deal with customers - here are their contact details. For cancellations you need a guy called (dean.saunders AT pipex.net) e-mail. For sales you need a guy called (markcarberry AT pipex.net). e-mail

These two people are entirely responsible for the duties of the managers, the staff levels and procedures within the call centre and ultimately the service you get.

If you would like to show these people (and more importantly their bosses) how incompetent you think they are then there are a few things you can do.
1. call them and hang up before they answer. They are judged on abandoned call rates and a rise in this will have a very negative reflection on their performance
2. If anyone can arrange a flood of calls so that there are more calls than agents to handle them then again this will have a negative reflection on their performance. This applies to the cancellations department only and will have no effect if you try to get customer services as they are expected to keep people waiting."

None of us are able to speak to managers as they are not allowed to take customer calls. They used to be able to but that has been changed in recent months. They are now told to take customer details and phone the customers back when they have time. Unfortunately they have very busy workloads, or are too lazy to make the calls.

If you were to contact their manager and the instagator of this system he will probably reverse this descision and we will be able to talk to managers again. You can send letters to dean saunders at the Christie Fields address on you bill, mark them private and confidential and sent them recorded delivery.

Put my name down on this petition.

3 months ago Pipex telephoned me asking if i wanted to move to them £30 a month for unlimited BB and phone calls. The only way i was going to move from my current ISP was if i got a static I.P address, the sales guy on the phone said yeah yeah no probs letme take your bank details. Allmost straight away i was without broadband as AOL switched me off and Pipex didnt switch me on for 2 weeks, 4 phone calls later my broadband was activated.( * Pointless having migration codes when this happens..)

What a suprise no static I>P address, i was put on there standard homecall package. I could of stayed with AOL and got exacly the same service for more or less the same money. 5 more phone calls later asking them to sort it i was just getting passed from customer care to support and back again, Customer care was saying its Supports fault and support was saying its customer care fault. I could tell they was not bothered. So i asked for my migration code, Suprise again they have to ask support to generate it. (Absolute Crap) , I just got sick of it yesterday and canceled the direct debit to them wrote them a lettrer informing them of my intentions , and transferred my phone back to BT (more expensive but they can be trusted)

If they want to fight about the rest of the contract they can, i will gladly see them in court. I only agreed to switch to them if i had a static I.P address this they never supplied so in my eyes its a breach of contract on there behalf.

Yesterday I DEMANDED to speak to a manager on the phone, REPLY was: "Sorry all managers are busy" but did manage to get the mac code out of them which ive been asking for for 3 months.

They dont reply to any emails sent, Pass you about on the phone they just give a complete crap service.


Also im not sure how it works 100% but PIPEX buy/rent broandband from Tiscali, if you do a traceroute you will see you are being routed through the Tiscali network, if i wanted to be on the tiscali network i would of signed up with tiscali, which also is a slow service through the day.

Ive given my mac code back to AOL, Email is not very good but the 5 years ive been with them ive had about 2 hours downtime, at the moment with pipex im being dissconnected every 10 mins and download speeds through the day are managing about 30k/b.s which is bad to say im on a 8mb connection and live 800 yards from the exchange. (and this is not a hardware fault my end)

To make things worse last week Pipex telephoned me and asked if i wanted to "recommend a friend" to them, Give u 2 guesses what i said. A few days ago 2 guys knocked on my front door asking if i wanted to swtich to Pipex they got a nice reply also. (Wish i had a dog now)

SHAPED - Please read my previous comments on who to contact. If your original call when you signed up was one you made into them then its the cancellations manager you need to speak to. If the original call was one they made to you then it is the sales manager you need to contact. Either way they have recordings of all calls and you should be able to demand a copy to prove you were mis sold.

The Pipex system is the one with static addresses as pipex are their own sevice privider. The pipex homecall system only rents space from tiscali and as such can not offer you a static isp.

I would recommend against you just cancelling your dd as pipex will just sell the debt to an external collections agency and it will be them who takes you to court to recover the money so that would just be a waste of your time. The only way I know of for you to get them in to court is if you instigate it.

"...unfortunately you have agreed to a 12month contract and you would have been advised of this when you signed up over the phone. Unfortunately we have no record of a call advising you wished to cancel the service with the 7 day period."

so this is the response i get from some cretin at customer services, in reply to an email sent within the 7 day period asking to cancel.

i emailed them - and the have it in black and white - they REPLIED to the original email !!!
and also, it took 15 days for a response.

lets see what ofcom have to say.

i have never come across a company turn to sh*te so quickly.

absolutely appalling.

wouldn't mind if the speed and reliability was ok, but would you buy a car if it broke down every 5 minutes?
methinks not.

b*stards.

maybe some media coverage is needed - anyone fancy scaling big ben with a 'pipex is sh*t t-shirt?'

you might be better off contacting otelo than ofcom

Just want to say to everyone to keep bugging them, i've finally (4 months later) been refunded my money - but they're pretty sneaky so i'd advise not to pay by DD, i;ve informed them of my cancellation and they keep resurrecting it - the bank will actually put an injunction against them if they try and take money from the account again!!

Keep the awareness going of how terrible the customer service is and just keep bombarding them with e-mails, letters, i've also put in a complaint with CISAS so that my other line wll be cancelled without cost for the inconvenience.

the more people that know about this the less likely they will be able to keep treating their customers in this manner!

Good luck to everyone

Sarah

I'm rather confused by my new Pipex Max service at the moment.

I'm supposedly on IBSTREAM Pipex MAx (Or something like that) - It's about £24 a month (I think) and the speed is "Up To" 8 MB. When I ordered it, I was told my line test revealed I could achieve speeds up to 5.5 MB on this service. Therefore, I would expect to get between 3-4 MB as I'm a reasonable person and I know the actual speed you get depends on things outside of Pipex's control and can often be affected by the length of the telephone line, the SNR, internal wiring etc...

Anyway - I've bene on Pipex Max before - The exact same service. When I was on this service before, the day I was connected I was achieving beween 3 - 4 MB. The stabilisation period was still there and the connection fluctuated a little with each new connection and sometimes it dropped to around 2.4 MB and then went back up to 3.2 MB and then up again to 4.3 MB etc... But I was quite pleased with the connection and never had cause to call them. This was back in April/May of this year.

This time, it's another story!!!

I've had my Pipex Max Connected - all be it only yesterday - and it's connecting at rediculously low speeds. Last night, every speed test I did confirmed my download speed was approx 120kbps and my upload speed was apprently 400kbps. Never before have I had an upload speed 4 times higher than my download speed. It's almost always half the download speed for uploads. Also, I find it extremely hard to believe that even throughout the stabilisation period, they would send speeds as low as 100kbps down your line. I called up Pipex Tech Support and was told it was very unusual but they were unable to report it as a fault because they cannot do that within the first 10 days due to the stabilisation period.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? At one point, a speed test revealed that my download speed was 33kbps - That's LESS than dialup? Why would a broadband provider send a "Less than dialup" speed down your line during the initial testing period?

cancel now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's too late for us - save yourself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

get out of the contract before you are stitched up for 12 months worth of dial-up speeds for 25 quid a month