Talk-Talk What I Know So Far....

kondormid

A big problem here is that it looks like they will need to hold up the broadband service as it is not possible to provide so many lines so quickly. It could take months before the broadband becomes available. Yet they can it seems start charging you as soon as you can make calls. The net part is free remember, you are not paying for it, this means the amount of recall and liability is minimal.

Try asking for your money back because a free service was not supplied properly and you will get laughed at.

Tied for 18 months to a service they have not even got to supply, but you will have to pay for.

Have you all gone mad?

robbieinbath

I signed up for the new Talk Talk Broadband Free Forever deal alst weekend. I currently run a BT bysiness broadband and and business phone line - this TalTlak deal will now save me over £50 a month. BEcause of the uptake of this offer I can't get transferred until June for the broadband, but the phone line stuff happens in about 10 days. I did it through Carphone Warehouse in Frome, Somerset, they were excellent.

robbieinbath

In addittion to Kondormind's comments - Talk Talk confirmerd that I won't pay for broadband until it is connected. Aslo, the call line fetures such as call diversion and Featured Call Minder are cheaper than BT

dgrtechsupport

rooo wrote:

I've been with TalkTalk for over 2 years now on their various packages, and I would strongly recommend that anyone who is thinking about going with them weigh up the pros and cons of bad customer service versus a cheap price. Until very recently I have been very happy with them and their good deals, but the amount of problems I am having at the moment really is making me wonder if the cheap cost is worth the hassle.

I had heard reports about bad customer service before, but never took much notice, until this last week, when it finally hit me

I'm not saying don't go with them, just make sure you take everything into consideration.

I have been with Talktalk for around 2 years, after having problems with ntl, this package seems excelent. I have broadband with them and line rental and call charges all ready, by going to this (ok I have to be there for 18 months) I save over 23 pound a month, and I get 8 mb download speed, I currently have only 1 mb. I would go for it. It may take longer to apply but do it by phone as I did somethings over the net and it did not go through properly.

devsen

I have been duped by this type of what I call STGTBT offers, because they usually are. I signed up with Tiscali when they were making wild offers like this. Such offers are usually very inadequately resourced and are designed to grab market share rather than provide a good customer service. When things went wrong the service was appaling. The best the support people (from their call centre in India) could advise me was to reboot my PC. On one occassion after several reboots (meanwhile I am paying for a 0870 call) the service guy put me on hold and went away and after about 10 mins came back told me that my part of the network was down - this of course total rubbish. Tiscali had an unwritten policy of occassionally putting a selection of users off line for about 3 days since their servers could not cope. I have no reason to believe the same is not the case with TalkTalk and Carphonewarehouse. The problem that CPW face is a stagnent mobile market with flat revenues and thin margins so they have to think up a new gimmick to boost revenue and customers. The mobile market has now broken free of long contracts and restrictions on switching providers. Broadband in the UK (which is about 5 years behind the USA) is still stuck in the days of handcuffed customers.

I would never sign a 18month contract. Who knows what will happen next day let alone in 18 months. My argument is - "If your service is so wonderful, why do you have to handcuff customers?" Customers will stay if they like your service and not due to coercian. There are a number of one month only boradband services around for most you need tp pay the setup fee but if you don't like the service you can move. Until broadband is fully under user control and the stupid way that your line is reserved for your ISP is removed users will always be the underdog.

As you say Martin it is not clear how cheap rate service providers will be handled. I use a 0871 service to call round the world (landline and mobile) and it costs me 10p/min to call landline or mobile to India. How will this work? And don't forget that at least for now for most of us we still have to pay a minimum line rental charge to BT.

My advise this a Too Good To Be True offer and should be avoided like the plague, especially due to its 18 months handcuff clause.

All the best - Dev

JayEmm_3

Remember 'If it sounds too good to be true then it almost certainly is' and 'There's no such thing as a free lunch'.

The following is an honest experience from an existing TalkTalk user:

I've had my Broadband from TalkTalk for almost a year now, my connection and speed have been fairly reliable and TalkTalk are fine if all you want to do is browse the net/send email and don't encounter any technical problems in doing so.
However, if you do need Tecnical Support apart from the 50p/min call charge the other problem is getting through to TS in the first place 'please be patient/ our line are very busy at the moment/TalkTalk value your call' etc

Most customers complaining about TalkTalk blocking P2P/FTP/ Bit Torrent ports and slower than dial up speeds (when using these ports) signed up with TalkTalk when they launched their combined Broadband and Telephone calls package, advertising their service as 'UNLIMITED', 'download all the videos and music you want' they are not now getting what they signed up for. Sure TalkTalk have a duty to all it's customers to ensure everyone gets an equal 'bite of the cherry' but why don't TalkTalk throttle the heavy users,they certainly know who they are. It's tantamount to keeping the whole class in after school because of one or two miscreants.

Regarding the 'generous' 40Gb a month download limit on the 'free' broadband service, hmmm, if TalkTalk continue to limit P2P/FTP/Bit Torrent ports then customers are hardly going to exceed the 40GB limit are they?

If you have kidz, most certainly they will want to use Broadband for downloading music/videos/ constantly yapping on MSN and online interactive gaming, save yourself the grief and don't sign up for any Broadband package with TalkTalk, 'Free', or 'Unlimited'

cmylod

niff_noff wrote:

I use Bigfoot, which is an email forwarding service. Sign up for a free account which will give you "user@bigfoot.com" address. ... You can pay for spam filtering (us$5.95/quarter) and other email managemnet services if you need them.

An aside but bigfoot's anti-spam is not worth it. I tried it and had long diagloues with them over its deficiencies to the point of being given a specific address to send spam they could not filter (Russian and Korean). Gmail on the other hand scooped out the Cyrillic with a very high success rate.

ISPs' mail services don't compare well with the "free" ones. My Pipex one gets spam targetted at Pipex's standard known user naming policy (so many letters and so many numbers - heaven for auto-gen code). Talktalk is not losing much by not doing email, in fact it's probably saving a huge econimic headache in avoiding the costs of caching spam. But I worry about their Ts & Cs and the lack of a guarantee for data throughput. And what is all that about having their int'l service but having to use a code while unbundled on their net? Kerazy.

Edinburghlass_2

devsen wrote:

As you say Martin it is not clear how cheap rate service providers will be handled. I use a 0871 service to call round the world (landline and mobile) and it costs me 10p/min to call landline or mobile to India. How will this work? And don't forget that at least for now for most of us we still have to pay a minimum line rental charge to BT.

My advise this a Too Good To Be True offer and should be avoided like the plague, especially due to its 18 months handcuff clause.

All the best - Dev

With this offer you shift your line rental to TalkTalk and will not be paying BT anything.

newbee_2

Having been with Talk Talk myself I experience no problems as such; being a light user with no queries. Until one day I decided to move from BT landline to Talk Talk for line rental too. My motive to get one bill from Talk Talk and yet they could not give me one combined bill for my broadband too, this remained separate.
Having to cancel with them gave me further experience of their customer services which I have to agree with previous posts was terrible. They took a long time to give me my MAC code and when eventually I got it and moved they continued to bill me anyway. It was a lot of hassle and many phone calls later (because my e-mails remained unresponded to) that I eventually received a cheque through the post for the amount I had over paid. I again contacted them though because I had no final bill and therefore no closure, no way of knowing the bill really did run up until when I moved to my new provider. Then one day a few weeks later I received my final bill, with a 23p charge on it! They had refunded me too much......the saga continues as I have not paid this yet and suddenly their teams have time to contact me!!!

pricefighter

robbieinbath wrote:

I signed up for the new Talk Talk Broadband Free Forever deal alst weekend. I currently run a BT bysiness broadband and and business phone line - this TalTlak deal will now save me over £50 a month. BEcause of the uptake of this offer I can't get transferred until June for the broadband, but the phone line stuff happens in about 10 days. I did it through Carphone Warehouse in Frome, Somerset, they were excellent.

This Talk Talk offer is for residential customers. I think you might hit difficulties when you attempt to move a BT Business line to it.As BT can refuse to release it. Didnt the TT salesperson tell you this?.

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"robbieinbath In addittion to Kondormind's comments - Talk Talk confirmerd that I won't pay for broadband until it is connected. Aslo, the call line fetures such as call diversion and Featured Call Minder are cheaper than BT"

You do start technically paying for the BB as soon as the Line Rental/call package starts but as its allegedly free you obviously dont pay anymore when it turns up. However if they dont meet the Target date for BB and you decide to cancel it,you would be charged a cancellation fee of £70 even though you havent got the BB connected because the T&C clearly state the contract starts when the line rental/calls package starts not the BB!!! Did the helpful TT salesperson tell you this?