I use Pipex as my ISP (indeed, this site is hosted by them) and generally have found them pretty good, except that they seem to have a somewhat surreal idea of customer service. We've been without an internet connection for two days because of their latest farce.

Apparently, they ran maintenance on their servers which resulted in the PPPoE connection being changed to a PPPoA connection (or at least the settings significantly changing from what there was before). Of course, they didn't communicate this before it happened and it took two days for me to find out what the issue was (I'd pretty quickly diagnosed it to either BT or Pipex, with Pipex looking more likely). Anyway, phoned up and got told how to log back in, and it works, but I think that the load over Christmas as the kids are home is a bit of an issue. My line speed is now down around 2Mbs rather than 4Mbs, and larger downloads are dropping out (which is a pain when you're trying to install system updates).

I just wish they'd sent an email out before they killed my access so I could know what to do. It's identical to the lack of communication over the changes to the FTP servers 18 months ago, which I described here. Basic, poor customer service.

Hrumph!