News Pipex swallows Nildram

Pipex have bought out Nildram, according to an article on elReg. Nildram users and other interested parties, read on:

Pipex has bought AccentUK Limited - which trades as the much-respected independent broadband ISP, Nildram - in a deal worth £12.9m. The acquisition, announced today on the stock exchange, willl add around 35,000 broadband punters to Pipex's existing customer base, taking its total number of ADSL punters to 162,000.

Said Pipex chairman, Peter Dubens: "The acquisition of Nildram further strengthens Pipex's position as a leading UK provider of broadband services and takes the total number of broadband customers to 162,000. We continue to focus on our strategy of growth through both organic and acquisitive means, through opportunities which provide a clear strategic fit. The success of this strategy is demonstrated by the growth of our total customer base from approximately 12,000 customers in 2002 to over 350,000 customers today and a significant improvement in gross margin."

More here

 

Well, as a Pipex user I hope we get the famed Nildram reliabillity and lose the abysmal Pipex speed on binary newsgroups...

 

Woah! That's huge news. We use Nildram at work for our ADSL.

 

just to point out , hopefully this is just a coincidence , not a taste of things to come. my connection speed was abysmal early monday evening , forcing a reboot of my router , it took a good ten mins to get back online , and at precisely midnight , my line dropped entirely. i tried for twenty mins to get it back on to no avail. as you can see , its back now though. i have never once had the slightest problem with nildram over the last three years. like i say though , coincidence innit ?


surely they didnt balls it up THAT quickly ? pehaps they have a special "unreliability" script they install into any systems they own.....

 

Come to think about it, my nildram connection has been a bit crappy as of late too

 

Heh, yep for the last couple of days (and for the first time i hasten to add) my nildram connection has been a bit flakey and was completly unuseable for anything requiring more bandwidth than irc last night. Good swap chaps .

Col

 

This might've had something to do with your problems:

Closed by Hitesh Patel on 10 Aug 2004 09:36
----------------------------

Comment added by Hitesh Patel on 09 Aug 2004 19:53


We have had issue with one of the core switch which was corrupting packets. Reload of that switch has stabilised network and seem to have resolved the issue.

After prolonged monitoring, all looks fine although we will continue to closely monitor the platform.

Apologies for the inconvenience this may have caused to our customers and for not been able to update sooner as it took us long to track down the issue.
----------------------------

Raised by Hitesh Patel on 09 Aug 2004 19:53

Might be a good idea to sign up to Nildram's ticket mailing list. Then you'd know what's going on behind the scenes there.

 

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!

After 2 years happily with Pipex i was suddenly confronted with serious packet loss and a connection that kept on dropping completly, or when it was up, routed all my traffic via Paris. After getting NOWHERE with their absoloutly abysmal customer service and technical support people for 2 months i switched to Nildram. No more problems and customer service so good they have always replied to my e-mails within an hour.

Now its back to Pipex, via Paris no doubt, and endless hold music.

 

I have been a Pipex customer since they first introduced self install. there were a few teething problems at first that were fixed quickish (the routing over europe was a pain for a while but that was fixed blooming ages ago). I have had brilliant service form them i have to say but recently, since the weekend, i noticed some sporadic slowdowns and speedups also. I still have to say its mainly OK and not worthy of a complaint.

I expect theres plenty of information on this over at ADSLguide but havent looked yet. Ill hopefully get a chance to look in a short while.

 

That is huge news, I hope Nildram doesn't lose it's good reputation as one of the best ADSL providers in the UK.

 

Routing over Europe fixed ages ago? Well it was just over a year ago and the stock answer of 'its a problem with a competitors network' doesnt really cut it. Take that router out of the routing tables and the problems solved.

The Pipex forum on ADSLguide is , imho, a waste of time too. You try to ask a question about poor service and get bombarded by fanboys telling you how great their service is.