Hundreds for chop as Tiscali launches Pipex jobs purge

Tiscali will slash hundreds of customer care jobs at recent acquisition Pipex broadband and voice, staff were told yesterday afternoon. According to Reg sources at the firm, technical support will be provided by Tiscali call centres in North Africa and India from January 18. Tiscali refused to answer any questions* about the …

[Ian Osborne]

now cut the prices

Now services have been cut, can former Pipex customers expect lower ISP fees too? I left Tiscali because they were crap, and moved to Pipex, who were not the cheapest, but offered excellent customer service. Needless to say, I'm not happy about ending up back with Tiscali.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tiscali broadband telephone support

Just wanted to share my most recent Tiscali broadband support call with you from last week, my Tiscali supplied supplied modem/router would not connect.

During the call the Tiscali guy said, I need to discuss the problem with an expert, hold the line.... then a new guy says "hello how can I help". I start again to retell the saga. He stops me and says "I can't help you, we are the competition"! The Tiscali guy then says "I thought you could help as I'm unfamiliar with this specific modem". The other guy says "How did you get my number?" "Google" priceless!!!!

Suffice to say the problem was at the exchange and was fixed soon after.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think of anything to say other than:

Scum.

[Nick L]

pimpex...

I'm a pipex customer, and I have been for 4 years. Up until recently I've been happy with their service, and indeed have been recommending them to friends.

Not any more.

The service has gone from great to poor to non-existent, and this latest announcement seems to suggest it'll only be going in one direction.

So I'm off.

Are there any good broadband suppliers in the UK? Any recommendations would be appreciated.

[Matthew]

Service

I spent many years as a happy customer of Pipex's, however, service has gone significantly downhill. Time on hold was as high as 10 minutes each time I tried to call to close my account.

Not really suprising to find that Tiscali is running the show.

[Robin Mosse]

try any entanet reseller

fast, no hidden sneaky bandwidth caps, line bonding and even in some cases fairly good hosting packages. sensible but not bargain basement pricing.

I switched to ADSL24 from Pipex, adsl24 side was online quick and painless, getting a mac code from Pipex involved 15minuites of wheedling and discount offers from some twirp in the manchester office. How many times I said "no thank you I just want a MAC code" is confounding to say the least

[Jess]

tiscali call centers

I had the misfortune to deal with one of those.

A friends broadband packed up on thursday.

They were a nightmare. They couldn't deal with the fact he had a router. They seemed to think a router was just for wireless, not for the security benefits.

They even thought the operating system would make a difference (we could see the router admin page and it said there was no PPP connection).

One operative even inteneded to log that we had refused to help with diagnosis, despite the fact that I had explained to him that the point that the system was failing was the PPP connection (Not just the password/username), and we had confirmed the router worked and reflashed it to the latest firmware, just in case. My friend lost his temper with him at that point and had a really good go at him, (I'd already been pushed to the point of raising my voice earlier, which takes a lot.)

They tried to imply the router was at fault or incompatible, depite the fact that it was a decent make (Draytek), I had taken it to my house where it worked perfectly on talktalk, and that it had been working for months before.

My friend created such a fuss with Customer services the next day that they gave him a goodwill gesture of £30 (which we drank on friday night :) :) )

The service reappeared at the end of the weekend.

He gets about 2.5M connection, where his router gave 7.5M on my talktalk line just round the corner.

I assume many Pipex customers are making their escape plans.

[Andy]

i left pipex....

the minute el reg mentioned tiscali were taking over... were the people above me who only just realised napping???

ive gone off to BT and im happy with the service (but then its not gone wrong yet)

[Anonymous Coward]

@Jess - Working perfectly on TalkTalk?

"I had taken it to my house where it worked perfectly on talktalk"

In the immortal words of Monty Python: "you lucky, lucky bastard".

Just in case there's the remotest chance that anyone here will accidentally take your offhand comment as a sign that TalkTalk is a good ISP - they aren't.

You've got more chance of contacting the Beagle Mars lander than a sensible TalkTalk employee. And if you did contact Beagle you'd probably find it has more bandwidth and lower latency as well.

I know loads of swear words, but none that adequately describe their Internet experience.

Anyway, I'm all ears if anyone can recommend a decent ISP. How about Be? Are they any good?

[Stuart McQuarrie]

off

yep, I'm off too! My experience of customer services was not good from Pipex but now they are Tiscali I am even thinking about paying a penalty to leave early.

[Pin]

Tiscali was the worst ISP I ever had.

Poor pipex users :(

[andrew checkley]

To Jess, with dreytech issue

Jess,

They were in fact correct on this.

See here, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/22/zen_ar7_infineon_bt_fault/

Huge issue with dretech routers and certain others at the moment especially on LLU Circuits..

[Anonymous Coward]

Off-shoring - a simple rule

If a business sticks two fingers up to its British employees, it shouldn't surprised if its British punters stick two fingers up at it. Vote with your wallets, people.

[Anonymous Coward]

ISP's

All ISPs are crap,the filter and restrict in many ways to gain the most for less.

Yet we as users want more.

But lets stop and think, 10 years ago Pipex dial was 12.99 per month and you were lucky to get 56K download speeds and also lucky if you managed to get a connection at all.

10 years on, its faster its cheeper and its available more of the time in more places.

As for the routers avoid Draytek, ppp keepalive issues. Also on some Netgears. Ask your ISP to change the monitor sesson time out on the exchange. That fixes it.

[Chris Miller]

Stoke Mandeville

I assume this is my local Nildram centre, who continue (despite having been a Pipex subsidiary for a while now) to offer high quality service. Not that it's needed very often because their ADSL is rock solid.

So - this could go one of two ways:

(a) Tiscali take advantage of Nildram's expertise and start providing a decent service building on the existing base; or

(b) Tiscali dump all their calls onto Nildram and tell them to handle it with their existing staff numbers.

Guess which one my money's on? Now where's the number for my local BT rep ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoved

I hindsight I think I was lucky Pipex kicked me off back in March, now I'm with an Entanet reseller, costs a bit more but no limits (beyond my connection speed) and no throttling.

The funny thing is I can still use my Pipex email and webspace, hmm, wonder what I could put on my webspace to create some absurd bandwidth usage...

[Mark]

How to handle your ISP

What I did with NTL was inform them I'm exiting and cancel the direct debit.

OK, I'm *still* getting threatening letters but when they eventually get round to filing with the court, they'll have to show why I owe them the money. Something they seem unable to do for me beforehand, so I can't see how they'll manage it in court.

If your ISP is giving you gyp, cancel the direct debit if they can't fix it. They aren't supplying the goods, so you don't supply the money. Simple.

[Graham Lockley]

Me Too

You can add yet another ex-Pipex customer to the lists above and yet another one who held them in high regard. Fortunately I bailed out round about the time Ti(ts up)scali got their mitts on the company so I didnt have to put up with the 'support' others have.

[Anonymous Coward]

Serves them right

Having worked in the Manchester office I can tell you that whilst I have sympathy for some employees this is only what they (Pipex/Caudwell) have done to other smaller companies so its a case of what goes around come around. At least the residents will be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Still in contract...

... I'm thinking seriously about leaving even so. Is there actually any decent broadband supplier still out there who offer dynamic ip?

[Tom Parkinson]

good home / smb isp? try bethere.co.uk...

im a pipex corp customer with 4mb leased line so im shaking with fear that that div will go the same way of their dedicated server div - which has SERIOUSLY gone down the pan - we left after a raid failure and due to an SLA small print change we hadnt noticed... left us without a web server for 5 whole days in jan this year - moved out to datagate.co.uk much better smaller always answer tech questions within mins real people - and well now pipex dsl has gone too jeez get outta there people! i recommend BE 24 meg LLU (owned by O2 but dont let that worry u too much...) and well if u are NON LLU exhchage - yeah probably bt now theyve swallowed waitrose... theres noone left! ***thinks**** gap in the market ahoy/ quality customer service fast reliable domestic and smb dsl isp... hum wheres the bank managers number...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I Woud Never...

... Get Tiscali in my life, one of the main reasons being their Indian contact centres. I do not like companies that feel it is ok to take our money and supply service in the UK but not keep jobs here!

All they think about is cutting costs with cheaper labour when the service from offshore sites is utter shit.

About time we boycott all these companies that have Indian contact centres and deal with ones that employ in the country they supply service too!!!!!!

TISCALI ARE UTTER CACK FULL STOP!!

[Ben]

"I Woud Never"

hey mate , i happen to agree but for f*cks sake.........

don't pop a ventricle dude , its just a ride , easy .

its a zen thing .

[Colin Petford]

Gone...

As soon as I heard that Tiscali had bought Pipex I decided it was time to move on having had bad experiences with Tiscali before.

In the time it took to get my MAC code (quite a while) the Pipex service just seem to get worse and worse which only confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I wonder how many of the 570,000 Pipex customers still remain after the Tiscali purchase?

[Andy Worth]

Nildram

Nildram were always excellent when I was with them previously (I've just come back to ADSL after 2 years on cable after moving house) but I wonder how long it'll take for Tiscali to mess up Nildram as well?

I used to be with LineOne, which had a good service and a great community, but Tiscali took it over and it went downhill. The same is now happening with Pipex, and no doubt will happen with Nildram. Basically I think Tiscali keep losing market share (because they are crap) and their answer to this is to buy another ISP to boost their share, at least until the users can leave and go elsewhere again.

It's a shame that the large heaps of poo can swallow up and completely cover the small glimmers of gold.

[Matthew Morrison]

Heading for IDNet

I've been a reasonably happy customer with Pipex for just over two years, but after having a fairly nasty time contacting their customer support about a year ago the acquisition has given me fears that this will start up again.

Rang for my MAC code yesterday and I have to admit that the staff were polite and pretty fast, but too late now. IDNet here I come!

[Richard Jennings]

Yep, Nildram are excellent

Not the cheapest, but don't need to call support very often (once a year, max)

and performance is very good. Reasonable bandwidth limts (50 Gb per month between 8AM and midnight, unrestricted outside those hours) and good data rates (4 - 5 mbits, 2 miles from the exchange)

Hopefully, Tiscali don't screw Nildram up

[JB]

Indian Call Centres

Offshoring is just another synonym for greed in my book. I actively avoid outfits that use Indian call centres now, though it's getting harder and harder as time goes on. I always come away frustrated and slightly embarrassed after having dealt with an Indian call centre.

As for this takeover, just another phase of consolidation. You'd hope that when there are only a handful of huge ISPs, there would be at least one you could rely on. Somehow I doubt it very much. The only advantage I can see is that we wouldn't have to go back 10 or so years to the days when there were about 600 ISPs and you took your life in your hands choosing one that wouldn't go bust two weeks later.

Please, will someone with shedloads of money set up a sensible ISP we can rely on, so we don't have to take our chances with all the rubbish on offer at the moment.

[Steve Waters]

Do your research!

The sooner all these idiots stop signing up for the top 5 broadband providers the better, based purely on either because they see nice glossy ads in the papers or on the telly and think it's safer to go with a big company or go with whoever is the cheapest. Contrary to what some people have said here there ARE still a few good ISPs left - most of the Enta resellers, IDNet, Zen, AAISP, fast.co.uk, maybe Newnet and Be (if you can get it). Take your time and do some research on sites like dslzoneuk, thinkbroadband etc. Read and post in the forums, get word of mouth. Get a one month contract so that if you are not happy, you can migrate.