Your broadband?

www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3137-pipex-to-sell-to-tiscali-for-210m.html
Pipex to sell to Tiscali for £210m

Oh dear oh dear.

Well as Ofcom have proved themselves useless in terms of creating a decent
terms of reference for being a UK ISP it seems the marketplace will be
splitting up into:

Residential - £free-10 per week for a claimed gigabyte per second, but
"traffic shaped" such that newsgroups, P2P, FTP and anything else useful
other than web browsing will only operate from 00:01 to 00:02 per day. High
volume streaming and music download will however work effectively from
"Selected Vendors"(#).

Business - £25-35+vat for a circa2MB service any time of the day or night

What a damp squib LLU turned out to be for the customers.

(#) extra charges may apply

 

Hmm... Pipex own Nildram, yes? So does that mean that ultimately my
service will be owned suplied by Tiscali?

I hope that this doesn't result in my paying 27 quid a month for the
same service Tiscali sell for 12 or whatever.

*sigh* I think I might need to go back to BT.

 

Indeed. Good job I started removing all reliance on the pipex
"services" last week.

 

It does and Tiscali suck big time. Traffic Shaping for idiots.
Shame about Nildram. Move to ZEN, still independant.

 

TalkTalk have recently gone LLU at my local exchange. From over 2
years of almost total reliability (yes, really!) to slow and flaky,
with at least one service failure (anywhere between 2 and 12 hours)
per week since.

FERITE.

 

Christ. Back to BT, methinks.

When will Tiscali start fucking it up, do you think? how much time
have I got?

 

I don't what they did to mine when they did it recently but the quality
in that it don't seem to go wrong is as good as ever it was and the
price has gone down and the volume has gone up. If that is moving it to
LLU why should I complain?

And how do I use my free internet phone minutes anyway, can I do it wiv
bluetooth to my router?

 

Use the people I use - http://www.aaisp.net/ - no, they're not cheap,
but normally quite good at what they do and they *do* understand that a
network problem can't really be first reinstalling Windows on your Mac.

Oh, and they got a BT engineer out to my place for some fault diagnosis
within two days.

 

Doc Gonz0 wrote:

Or you look after all the kit and you can configure your own line

 

Cheapest unlimited on Zen is Zen Office 500 at ?38 + VAT pm.

Anything cheaper is capped.

 

That's what I have been saying. An ISP cannot put it out at much less and
turn a profit.

 

Do you have to also take the phone service with Be?

I *cannot* leave BT for the phone service, due to being able to get all
my work calls for free via some fancy divert code mallarkey.

 

Install a second line?

 

No.

Rang up Pipex to get the MAC[1], went to quidco, clicked through to Be,
entered code, job done. If you ring them up first, they'll run a quick
check and give you a speed estimate. I'm looking at getting about 16meg.


From their FAQ:
"Can you provide Be service over a cable line?

Be can only provide services over an active BT line, as our equipment
is only installed in BT exchanges."

It should be on in about a week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

[1] that I'd requested[2], and they'd then sent to the wrong email
address despite me telling them the one on file was wrong, and spending
3 minutes or more spelling out the new one
[2] What a palava. Speak to tech, speak to disconnections, speak to
tech, rinse, repeat, etc. They suggested doing a test, as if that came
up bad it wouldn't matter what the ISP was[4]. Fair enough. I do the
test, the webpage specifically said [If this test works, the problem's
not with BT, it's with your ISP]. It worked fine. The bottom-feeders
still refused to even entertain the possibility that it could be Pipex,
despite a team senior previously agreeing that the traffic shaping may
be the cause, and we reset to step 1: is anything else plugged into any
other phone sockets? ARRRGH! After re-wiring the sockets so that the
phone line came in, then went to the master socket, then to the router
*and nowhere else*, yes, I was sure nothing else was plugged in. At
this point I said "Stop. I've been playing this game for months, I
can't be bothered anymore. Just give me the code."

The useless bastards also charged us for the free month we were
supposed to be getting in recompense for all the hassle. Great way to
impress a customer on the verge of leaving.
[4] The problem is that anything that's not http drops to unusable
speeds, and or drops so much traffic that it doesn't work, between
about 5pm and 6pm to gone 11pm. Games, torrents, sometimes http/ftp
downloads. Couple that with paying £24 a month for a 1meg package and
it's definately time for pastures new.

 

Pointless, I hardly use the home line for anything other than work calls
so paying 2 sets of line rental would be a waste.

 

Well spotted, me!

Keep me posted, I'll likely be dumping Poopex soon, meself.

 

Indeedy - thanks for that.

Will do. Give 'em a call and see what you'll get speedwise. Might be
closer to 20meg while you're quite literally a stone's throw from the
exchange.

 

I have just jumped ship from Freedpm2Surf who are also owned by Pipex
and saved 10% on my monthly sub by going to NewNet. Another popular
choice is ADSL24+ for heavy users or the other Entanet resellers.

By, by, Tipex!

 

There is a shareholders meeting soon which needs to give its approval
and then Tiscali have a road-map for what their plans running into
next year.

OfCom are also sticking their neb in and are hold their own
investigation although compared to Sky / Easynet it is small beer.

 

Poor old F2S, I remember back when, quality ISP they were with great dial-up
services.