ive had no end of grief over the last 2 months since migrating my connection to my new flat...
picture the scene: i move flat end of nov 2005... i speak to pipex on the 21st of nov to try to move my connection, they say ok its cancelled just order a new connection at the new flat.
I order a new connection on the 29th of nov (still being charged for my old one up untill 14th dec including that month, 14dec-14jan)
i call up on 9th dec and say hey its supposed to be active 2mrw whats going on??? i get "oh sorry sir theres been a problem with your postcode, were going to have to start the order process from scratch again, it should be ready by the 14th"
*enter numerous emails to pipex that receive no answer, and a phonecall during which they tell me the activation is now the 21st of december*
16th december i notice my router is connecting to an adsl line, but i have no password from pipex... so i try my old account (that im still paying for!), this works so i have broadband, on the 21st i ring up and say "hey where the fks my new account details - they give me account over phone".
During that time, i had 3 ignored emails, and spoke to them on the phone 3 times each with a 18 minute wait in a queue.
For those of you that cant be arsed to read that, ordered pipex on 29th november, finally receive pipex on 21st december having been told it would be active on: the 9th, 14th and 16th. Moral of story, avoid pipex like the plauge unless you like being bummed by retarded customer service reps.
i was with pipex for like 1 1/2 years, and they are so, god damn awful. a few months ago i heard about a good isp (www.freedom2surf.com) who were offering 8mb (although i could only reach 4mb due to my distance from the exchange) for the same price as my 1mb from pipex, so i migrated as soon as i could. the migration went smoothly apart from pipex "forgetting" to stop charging me monthly for the connection i didn't have. after around 2 weeks of being with freedom2surf, i hear that pipex has bought, and now owns them. it seems they just couldn't handle losing a customer to another isp. so, 3-4 weeks after hearing this dreadful news, my line magically starts to become ridiculously unstable, and i start to get disconnected almost daily, with periods of 5-30mins of downtime after being disconnected. additionally, my 4mb line starts to only hit 200-300kb/s download speeds on uncapped 4-6connection servers that i've been getting 450kb/s on for weeks.
lol Having watched it now you gotta laugh at the "they never respond to emails and only answer the phone after 20 mins bit, i said exactly the same thing 5 mins beforehand in the post above ; )
i was downloading it just now and the server died after like 5mb so i got a partial file which my browser obviously thought was complete. same thing might have happened to you ? redownloading :)
I think pipex were good in the 90's, but since then NTL and other ISP's have just totally got their act together.
I'm on the 10mbit NTL and the service has been pretty damn flawless for 2+ years.
I went with Zen - OK so it costs a bit more but the service is top notch. I'd rather pay extra for a stable connect with great service than a deal where you are promised speeds that don't happen irl and a service team that you can never get hold of ....
I've been with pipex for almost 4 years now in three different houses. It has always been excellent for me. Low stable pings and downloads at the rated speed of my connection. I've been disconnected 3 times in those 4 years and the longest outage was around 5 hours.
Getting through to customer services (this applies to lots of companies) is a question of thinking it through and ringing at a quiet time.
I think it depends what realm your on. I was on 'xtreme3' (most new customers now are on like 5 or 6 afaik) but I knew akuma+verb was on 'xtreme' because they joined years before. I always had outages and increased pings all the time and got back on IRC and asked them if they had the same, never. Over the past 4-5 months my pings ALWAYS increased at like 7pm (just before league matches etc which pissed me off, then a month ago it would hit like 200ms to everywhere at around 6pm (didnt happen to 'xtreme' realm) for around 2 weeks then found out the routing was going from UK > USA > to connect to a UK server?wtf?! So I think there are issues on the later pipex realms, anyway I cancelled my service and am waiting to be enabled again :)