Pipex Still Sucks

Following up from my previous rant about the terminally bad customer service experience I had with crappy Pipex, I have now had a letter from them explaining some of their “reasoning.” Even after reading this, I can confirm Pipex still suck and Pipex is still a “Bad Shop.”

There are two strands to my current annoyance. The first is a common one in the UK, in that I am paying for an “up to 8MB” broadband service and actually getting half a megabyte. Before this fiasco began, I was averaging around 4Mbps which was acceptable and there certainly have been no new broadband users on the exchange (the area is small enough that I would know). One of two things has happened – either BT have ****ed up when they tried to fix the connection or Pipex have spitefully changed my access without telling me. I have no way of knowing which it is, but before the problem the router I use reported its connection as “8192kbps” every time it connected (this was different to the actual speed I could get from the connection though). Now every time it connects, it reports a speed of “576kbps.” Upstream remains constant. Maybe some one who knows more about these things can tell me what is going on, at the moment I am waiting for Pipex support to come back to me over the problem. (I am not holding my breath…)

Secondly, the letter itself. This is a whole page basically telling me that Pipex pride themselves on their customer service but, basically, this is not Pipex’s fault. While this may well be true, it says nothing and answers none of my questions. Priding themselves on their customer service is irrelevant when their staff are rude and unable to help. It is a nice corporate slogan which looks good on advertisements, but the reality is they have a disgruntled customer and telling me I am in a minority does nothing to assuage that. As for it not being Pipex’s fault, why should I care? My contract is with Pipex not BT – it seems they were too lax (or too cheapskate) to negotiate a service level agreement with BT and as a result are unable to use any leverage with them. Pipex refused to give me any contact details of people at BT who I could complain to (or check on the status of the problem), so to all ends and purposes, Pipex are at fault. If you go to a restaurant and the food tastes poor, do you think the chef would turn round and say it wasn’t his fault the supplier sent bad tasting tomatoes?

The only sliver of light at the end of the tunnel is Pipex have given me a months free line rental, when the month will happen is beyond me as I have no intention of remaining with them. If anyone reading this works in a customer relations / retention type field, please take note. Hollow promises and corporate buzzwords do not make up for crappy service. Pipex should know better, but basically Pipex sucks.

[tags]Pipex, Bad Shops, Bad Customer Service, Technology, ADSL, Internet, ISP, Bad ISP, Bad Service, Internet Access[/tags]

7 thoughts on “Pipex Still Sucks

  1. By the way, why is it that when one ISP buys up another ISP, the previous excellent service of the bought ISP plunges into a pit of crap.

    Tiscali (terrible ISP) managed to buy Pipex’s broadband and voice service (see this news item for example) and now it is barely usable. The same happened when Telewest bought up the excellent Blueyonder and when Virgin Media bought it all everything really went down the pan.

    You would think that if you bought and existing, quality, company you would want to keep it that way…

  2. Another thing to watch out for is continued debits when you cancel. When I cancelled Tiscali they kepy debiting. I’d phone up and they’d say they’d cancel the debits and refund the fees. In the end they added credit to the account for the fees they’d incorrectly taken. In the same statement they charged again for another month’s access and noted that they were unable to debit it from the back account because the direct debit had been cancelled, which meant they were suspending service. :/

    Sky is proving patchy but not too bad.

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  4. I am experiencing similar problems with Pipex. Before June 2007 I was enjoying broadband speeds of 6-7mb then over night I began experiencing multiple dropped connections (20 per day) which resulted in my speed dropping as the weeks went by. Over three months later I am now “enjoying” a broadband speed of 127kbps. I might as well be on ISDN!!!

    I’ve had two BT engineer visits who both report no problems as they can achieve a connection of 7mb to the local exchange! Pipex blame BT who blames Pipex who blames BT etc.

    I feel your pain! Pipex support sucks (they don’t know anything and simply blame BT!)

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