Artur Hefczyc

I have just experienced 2 weeks of Internet connection outage. That is really bad experience for a person who bases his work on the Internet technologies. But that was not the worse part of all.

The worse part was the support from the Internet provider side.

I called them every day to hear about the progress. For a few first days they were telling me different stories of what could happen. They tries to push the problem towards BT and asked me to do some phone line testing and so on...

After a few days one of the person from the technical team said: "Ah, there is some maintenance carried on in your exchange box. It may take up to 5 days...." Hm. First of all why they didn't tell me that on the first day? Actually there is a point in the "Terms & Conditions" document that in case of longer outages customer should be notified ahead of time of that event.

Of course nobody cared to notify me so just in case I called the technical support the next day. I was told that, indeed there is a maintenance carried on but usually customers doesn't get disconnected. A short connection drop may happen only. So I could be accidentally disconnected by the engineer and from now on my connection is flagged as faulty and engineer will looks at it in a few coming days. When? Maybe tomorrow but they have 6 days to respond for the issue.

I called again for next 2 days to hear exactly the same story. So at this point I stopped to believe anything would change in acceptable time. I ordered a business class Internet connection from a different provider on a second phone line and sent complaints to the old provider customer service and customer care. I have also sent an e-mail to the technical service in this provider.

In meantime I noticed the old provider charged my bank account for the next month of "their service". After 2 weeks I had enough. Nothing has changed. Every day the same story. I called this time customer care department to cancel my account and terminate the contract. It wasn't easy to get to them by the way. I was sent from one phone number to another 5 times before I could talk to somebody about canceling my account. I asked also for a refund for the time the service was not available to me and for the next month they already charged my account.....

This is the most "funny" part. They were very happy to process cancelation of my account but then... They said they won't refund me any money because I have just cancelled my account and I haven't given them a chance to fix the problem!

I have send a few complaints and I haven't received any response to them so far.... I have only received response from their technical service that the problem is now fixed. And indeed. Next day after I called to cancel my account the old connection started to work mysteriously. On the same day the new phone line has been installed and Internet connection from the other provider has been activated though.

I have written this story with all the details to warn you to keep away as much as possible from the Pipex Internet provider which has been just bought by Tiscali. Their technical support is a disaster. I wouldn't recommend it to my enemy. And the story is not over yet. I am still waiting for a response to my complaints....