How good is the Pipex Solo broadband service

[Stan Sted]

I have just spoken to a salesman at Pipex about their Solo broadband service. It sounds impressive.

For £23.44 a month and no connection fee I can have a 24/7 service that is "40 times faster than a 56k modem".

All I need to do is buy a £129 ADSL modem, wait about 10 days for the order to be processed then use the net for as long as I like.

With BT Anytime charging me £14.99 for anything but anytime, I get about 40 minutes day of useful service before it slows down, stalls for up to 10 mins at a time and cuts me off constantly after two hours.

No contest I reckon. But I would welcome any advice from existing Pipex users. The usual reward of pints at the Gatbash on June 29 will apply.

Note: this message took about three minutes to type and about 20 minutes to send. The BT link had stalled and I had to wait for them to put another 20p in the meter.
cheers SS

[pilot-lite]

I've been using Pipex ADSL for the last month or so, and have nothing but good things to say. Having spoken to other users before taking the leap, I've yet to hear a negative comment.

The 10 day wait for activation turned out to be 6 days, *including a bank holiday weekend*. :) This is not at all unusual.

The service never fails to connect first time, it has not dropped the connection once, despite sometimes being left for days at a time.

The 576kbps connection speed is the maximum, and Pipex point out that at times of high usage, your actual download speeds may drop as you effectively share a chunk of bandwidth with up to 50 other users. However, I have not noticed it dropping once, and downloads are scarily fast compared to dial-up. The progress bar fairly shoots across the screen.

Check out http://www.adslguide.org.uk/

pilot-lite

[Evo7]

I've been a Pipex ADSL customer for a couple of months now and I'm also very happy with it. Only problems have been a couple of brief outages (each less than an hour and both blamed on BT ;) ) and rather slow customer service post-setup - setup itself was very quick and efficient - but these are only minor moans. I'd recommend them. :)

[BALOO]

Stan
I think PIPEX would be an excellent idea. The only reason I'm using BT broadband with Openworld is because I didn't do any homework to find out a cheaper option! Having said that, I've no complaints about the service from BT - great speeds, no problem connecting/disconnecting.
However, beware ----------- I use both my desktop and laptop with the BT connection. The laptop has no problems whatsoever but my desktop (a Gateway) often 'hangs' for 30 seconds or so, where nothing seems to happen. This happened just the same when I was using the internal 56K modem and I suspect it has all to do with the computer, not the BT connection! I've heard that other people have similar problems (although not as bad as yours seams to be) Make sure that, if you spend hard earned cash on new modems etc, the problem does not lie in software within the guts of your computer as it will be just the same afterwards! How do you check this? Sorry, I've no idea - but I'm sure someone here will have.
Best of luck
BALOO :)

[WhiteSail]

Pipex is a first class service in my experience.

However, there is a consideration.

If your motherboard has a VIA chipset, there are known problems with the Alcatel drivers. However, with Pipex, you can choose to select a modem of your own choice (which is the option I took and it works fine).

Whether you can deal with this, depends upon you experience level, but I would certainly look at the site below, for a cheaper and more efficient alternative modem.

For one telephone, all this modem needs is an adaptor that can be supplied by the same company.

http://www.solwise.co.uk/adsl-pci.htm

[chadders]

Another happy Pipex Xtreme Solo user. Well worth it - I was connected 6 days early and have been in broadband heaven for a month now. Sounds like a similar experience to Pilot-lite and arounf the same time.

I elected to go with an external router (ZyXel P645R) - it eliminates any USB problems and allows me to connect multiple machines independently to the Internet.

Pipex customer service and broadband performance have both been excellent - I normally get 50k-60k downloads (Liverpool area) but this depends on the number of users contending for the total 512K.

The full service offerings are very good as their major customers are major businesses. I did a lot of soul searching and slow research on dial-up (http://www.adslguide.org has a good set of forums which include h/w reviews and tech support) and finally decide on Pipex (plus the no fee connection).

I wholeheartedly recommend Pipex - Go for it - after all its a small price to pay to surf the PPruNe forums at lighting speed
:D

[Unwell_Raptor]

Another happy Pipex bunny here (about 7 weeks so far). Fast and clean. There was a service outage a few weeks ago, and the top man posted an explanation and apology on the pipex broadband newsgroup on Usenet - imagine the BT man doing that.

Having been lied to and treated with contempt by BT and by Freeserve I have crossed my fingers that this is the future for me!

At £23.44 per month, if you take off the BT Anytime fee, and the saving from getting rid of one phone line, the cost is as near as dammit the same.

[SpinSpinSugar]

Taking both modem/service default packages, Pipex becomes cheaper than BT Openworld after seven months of use, and remains so from then on. I've had no trouble with them - very quick service from enquiry to installation, and no subsequent problems.

I note with interest comments about download rates - I too have never had more than 64k/sec downloads (settled rate) no matter how many concurrent connections I have. I believe this MAY be to do with artificial bandwidth throttling to 64k (Windows recognises the Alcatel USB device as an ISDN modem and not a DSL one). Any comments?

Still bloody fast though.

My MP3 collection is rocketing.

[pilot-lite]

Some confusion here I think....

You connect at 576 KiloBITS per second.

You download at 64 KiloBYTES per second.

The point being that there are 8 bits to a byte, giving a maximum theoretical speed of 72 Kilobytes per second.

You will be unlikely to get 72kbps as congestion between the server and you, error correction etc will all eat into this, but a stable 64kbps is pretty good going. You'll be lucky to get much over 5kbps with dial-up.

pilot-lite

[SpinSpinSugar]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

[Stick Flying]

Also happy with Pipex.
Any outages I have had (probably 2 in a month) have been hardware problems at the exchange. So would have had problem with any ADSL server. My only problem now is getting off the damn computer to go to work