Ok, that's it. Goodbye Pipex

I've finally had enough. Very shortly I'm going to be saying au revoir to Pipex internet. I've been with them years, but through the various acquisitions - first by Tiscali, then by Talk Talk/Opal the service has become poorer and poorer. There are times when my internet link just appears to turn up it's toes and say, "not tonight".

I've hung on, out of some misplaced loyalty to a company that's long since vanished as it used to exist when I started with them, but reading this months PC Pro Awards (you can't read them online yet - I've seen them because I'm a subscriber so get the mag early), Pipex languish in 16th place for fixed line broadband providers, held off rock bottom place only by AOL. These awards are based on readers experiences, so they aren't biased by anything particularly other then real life scenarios, and there had to be a certain number of readers submitting info to make the rating valid. Notwithstanding that, I rate PC Pro's views anyway.

Pipex's ratings were as follows, (out of 6 bizarrely)

• Reliability - 2
• Speed - 2
• Customer support - 1
• Value for money - 2
• Recommended? - 1
  
• Overall - 1

As a comparison, the top two performers were Zen Internet and Be Broadband. Zen scored 6 in everything except value for money where they rated 5, and Be scored 4 in Reliability and 5-6 in everything else. Third placed O2 was just a smidgeon behind Be.

I think at this moment I'm going to go with Be, with their value package at £13 a month for up to 8meg and unlimited downloads. My line can't receive more than 2 meg according to most providers assessments, but I'm not even getting close to that with Pipex.

The difficulty, however will be actually cancelling the Pipex account. There are tales upon tales of woe on thinkbroadband.com of people who have had terrible problems trying to geyt their MAC code and cancel their account.

Wish me luck!