22 October 2008

The curse of Pipex

The curse of Pipex has struck again. Open University students who are unfortunate enough to have Pipex as their ISP are being denied access to the OU's servers in the evening because Pipex is 'Traffic Managing' and treating the OU client/server interface as a peer to peer network, which it is most definitely not.

Pipex, of course, deny that they are doing this. However, it's a bit strange that ever since Tiscali took over from Pipex, no OU students have been able to access the server in the evenings. This means that they cannot get on with their coursework or access their tutor groups or course conferences, having the knock-on effect that they can't get on with a fair chunk of their studying.

I wonder how many students will hold Pipex responsible if they fail their courses because they couldn't access some of the materials when they needed to?

If there's anyone from Pipex reading this, please, I beg you on behalf of the quarter of a million OU students out there, STOP BLOCKING PORT 510! It is NOT P2P, it is a client/server relationship. Pipex is preventing legitimate use of the service because of ignorance.

EDIT - Sunday 26 Oct - My fellow students and I still can't get into the server in the evenings. I have had enough and I intend to ditch Pipex in favour of an ISP that does actually give a shit, and bothers to respond to complaints instead of either ignoring them completely or keep asking for information such as my date of birth, which is bloody irrelevant and just a delaying tactic because they can't be arsed to resolve the matter.

I find it very sad that Pipex, which once had a reputation for excellent physical service and customer service, has turned into a pile of crap since being taken over by Tiscali.

2 comments:

Spikey said...

If every student with Pipex left there ISP on the same day, do you think they would notice then ?

Oz said...

It's sad that the general level of service from ISPs in this country is somewhere around that of a Nigerian cyber cafe.