The purchase of Plusnet by BT came as a relief to most of their customers as they were running out of capacity after coming into some financial trouble, their ellacoya traffic 'prioritising' was becoming an absolute joke, you couldnt even connect to a WinMx Chatroom between 12am and 12pm, BT vowed that the 1st thing they would do would be to invest in more capacity in preperation for the 21CN rollout, if you ask me they are simply using Plusnet as guinea pigs to test the technology, and judging by the state of the Plusnet Forums its done no good whatsoever, avoid plusnet at all costs
With regard to Tiscali buying Pipex, I don't see how this will make much of an impact at all, both ISP's heavily prioritise P2P traffic to a point where again, even entering a WinMX chat room can become impossible
Avoid these ISP's at all costs