After the acquisition of Pipex broadband by Tiscali, the customers of former have been moved to the LLU network of Tiscali even without receiving proper notice from their provider. However, recently Pipex customers could experience the sharp slow down of the speeds of their connections for which Tiscali gave the following explanation in its forum:

“We are aware that there is an issue in this area which is currently being addressed.
We will post in here when further updates are available. Sorry for any inconvenience caused. As well as having an impact on gaming, this issue is a cause of peak time slow speeds and is currently affecting: iTunes access, VPN/FTP/RDP just to mention a few."

It seems the migratory process of Pipex customers to Tiscali network was behind the this technical problem. Further the ISP said the engineers were fixing the problem and the normalcy would return soon as a few service changes were made late Friday night.

Meanwhile, Tiscali’s process of shifting Pipex customers to its shared LLU network is continuing. While this move will not affect the customers with regard to migration, however, they have to bear with the traffic shaping that Tiscali uses with its unlimited packages. Traffic management which restricts the speed during the peak hours may pose problems for those who log on to P2P sites or play online games.

Tiscali’ cheap broadband packages come with unlimited download limit, however, as the speed is managed by the ISP, it is unlikely that one will get satisfactory speeds during the peak hours. In such cases, one has to upgrade to high level packages which could have higher monthly cost.