Recently, it was announced by Tiscali that they intend to buy out the broadband and phone business from Pipex (The first and therefore oldest commercial ISP in the UK). Presumably Pipex wishes to concentrate on the probably much more profitable business of network consultancy and web hosting of sites such as nochex and Honda F1. Intriguingly the Pipex site has no mention of this buyout.

I have used Pipex since 2002 back when they offered 512/256 kbps (down/up) for 23.49 . They have always been fairly reliable, (except they sent an ADSL modem with cable drivers which would work for a just long enough to check your emails, then they'd drop the connection, but that for a whole other topic of why USB is overused) They have since offered to give us a connection as fast as our phone line supports for that same 23.49/month.

However Tiscali is a name that no-one really wants to be associated with recently. They have been hit by spammers hard, and many ISPs are blocking all e-mails from Tiscali users as spam. Not only this but the Italian company is clearly fighting for it's life. It has already sold its operations in Germany, France and the Netherlands, leaving only Italy, Czech Republic and of course the UK. This company is determined not to go down!

Broadband in general in the Uk have been shaped by various mergers and acquisitions. Cable and Wireless sold their Bulldog broadband service (which offered high speed access by using Local Loop Unbundling) to Pipex, Virgin acquired NTL (or as I prefer the more accurate form NThelL) carphone warehouse acquired the UK operations of AOL (who in themselves were awful anyway) and numerous other mergers I can't remember now.

The main problem with UK broadband is that it is very Dependant on a few companies, none of which have great customer service records. The worrying thing is, there is no need for them to make their services better value - they all are as bad as each other.

Learn more about this author, Michael Cullen.
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