Their deal sounds attractive. £30 per month but with free phone calls and your telephone line rental thrown in. That makes it sound amazingly cheap. Unfortunately the typical length of time before people seem to try and escape the service is about two to three months. Pipex, however, insist on a £300 payment for early contract termination from these disaffected customers.

They claim in their advertising that this is an uncapped service, but the truth of the matter is it is capped at about 1GB per week. If you exceed that amount you are put onto a “naughty pipe” which throttles your speed to about 50Kbps (yes, modem speeds) and you will be denied access to technical support.

This review is typical:

If you ever think of going with this company do some research on its heritage this will lead you to evaluate whether (so-called) cheapest is always best.

I ,and many others have realised that the stick-and-carrot of a cheap deal that gets you locked into a 12 month contract is fine so long as when there IS a problem it can be sorted out, and it can be sorted out easily and cheaply.Then you realise just WHY they have needed to lock you into the contract-there is no way to keep you otherwise,because of their notorious Customer Service.

The company was owned by John Caudwell, who previously owned Singlepoint. Research on Singlepoint ALONE will be enough to put you off them,because he took his same business core values to Homecall when he set it up,as the BBC Watchdog report depressingly tells.

History repeats itself with Home Call.-.It on average takes 3-4 months and repeated calls (0870 numbers which cost you money) to get any issue sorted out,with an average phone call length being half an hour, and 12 phone calls about average. They make it impossible to speak to a Supervisor Manager,or escalate a complaint,despite what their own complaints procedure says.

Typical low point in our relationship- was after having reported a fault, and several phone calls later having to stand outside in the cold to be kept hanging on for 45 minutes on my mobile, ( NO signal indoors) insisting,politely as usual that i speak to a Supervisor.

The CS assistant tried their best (constantly going off the line) to get the Supervisor to speak to me,then told me she was in a meeting,then finally that she had gone home.

www.bbc.co.uk/consumer/tv_and_radio/watchdog/ reports/services/services_20060404.shtml. Is the Watchdog article.

Search other review sites and read the comments.Will they improve now owned by Pipex?No, its too massive a task.Their Customer service has been no different.The call takers are stillPolite-but then so was Sweeney Todd.

As for the stick and carrot-they beat you with the stick until you become a vegetable.

I thought their deal seemed good-cant wait till I am out of the contract.I will leave others to comment on the “value for money ” and the efficiency of the broadband.

Just report any unresolved issues to BBC watchdog via their email facility

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Homecall__Review_5575773

So if you are looking for broadband service, don’t go with Pipex Homecall.