Despite having seemingly ample time to put a number of press releases together, UK ISP Gio Internet has still failed to respond when asked about their growing service difficulties.

The various problems, which are listed below, have been growing since rumours were first circulated regarding NeonHippo going into liquidation. We were unable to gain a response to that issue as well.

So far the key complaints about Gio regard their lack of customer support, an advertised yet apparently non-existent newsgroup service and some serious billing errors.

A common example of the complaints we've seen comes from, Ainul, whom reflects the problems reported by others quite well:

I am writing to complain about the service (or lack of) provided by Gio Internet. I hope you could publish my complaint as a warning to others before they make a terrible mistake to subscribe with this horrible provider.

I subscribe to Gio Internet's Broadband service (advertised at £17.99 per month) on 7th of November, 2002. The online registration went on smoothly and my credit card was charged immediately for £96.01 to cover costs of installation and also a one-month deposit.

On the 11th, the website informed me that the order was cancelled. Repeated attempts to call to Gio's technical and business were not successful. Queues are extremely long and when my turn was up, it was frequently disconnected and I have to wait in the queue once again. Finally once I've spoken to the telephonist, he cannot resolve my problem and promise to look into it. Unfortunately, to this day, the solution is still not resolved.

Frequent faxes and mails followed, but still without answer. I finally make the effort to visit their office at Oldham, and spoke to a person in-charge. He told me that my problem was technical and it has to do with BT. He promised to have the matter looked into as soon as possible.

To my surprise, my credit card was charged £18 on the 10th of December, while there still no connection in sight! I was furious and called them many times and demanded my money be refunded. I sent a registered mail asking to look into this matter and have my line activated or have all my money refunded. Still not resolved.

Now, my credit card is charged again on the 10th of January and once again on the 10th of February. I called up by bank (HSBC) to cancel this instruction and they were not helping too...! What the hell is wrong with the customer support of all these British companies now?!

Till now, I have been charged in excess of a hundred pounds without any connections at all. I would recommend to all hard-working British citizens to avoid Gio Internet.

It remains to be seen whether Gio will finally do something to remedy the situation above and all those like it. We hope that Gio can take a little time out from incorrectly billing customers to issue some kind of service update.