Pipex pushes broadband for SMEs

Pipex Business has launched a range of broadband services aimed at small to medium-sized businesses.

The business-grade ADSL2+ services come in a variety of flavours, ranging from Pipex Lite, at £14.50 plus VAT per month, to the Premium+ service, at £49 plus VAT per month.

"The need for service reliability and quality support could not be more important for this sector," said Lance Spencer, Pipex's product and marketing director, on Thursday. Speaking at the launch of the portfolio in central London, Spencer claimed that only 23 percent of small businesses currently use business-grade ADSL, and over 40 percent of small businesses still use connections of 2Mbps or below.

Spencer said the new Pipex Business services, which start from maximum downlink speeds of 8Mbps and go up to 16Mbps, all benefit from guaranteed minimum bandwidths of either 200Kbps or 500Kbps. Customers will also have 24/7 access to a dedicated, business-only support centre based in Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire.

An "enhanced care" option, which gives customers access to a dedicated "escalation team", is also available. Users of this option will have the added guarantee that, if their fault is not fixed within 10 hours, they will get a full refund of that month's rental on the affected line.

Pipex's broadband divisions were sold off to the Italy-based company Tiscali in July 2007. Speaking at Thursday's launch, Mary Turner, the chief executive of Tiscali UK, said the acquisition of the divisions had been key to bringing business service capabilities into the hands of Tiscali.

The event also saw the launch of the Pipex Business Portal, which is intended to be a homepage for small business users. The portal combines various legal, HR and financial business resources with news, weather forecasts and tools such as currency converters.