TalkTalk Free Broadband

DinoM

I did my own research about TalkTalk Broadband after reading about it on these pages. Its a fair offer at £22 per month (if you apply for all the discounts & pay by deal of death DD) for telephone & broadband.

The only problem which occurs more and more these days as governments create legislation to protect the big corporations which they hold shares in (or is that Royal family shares?) is the service level agreement or actually the complete lack of one.

I had been with Free-Online braodband for 4 years but they have a really big customer base now (for their 2 staff) and they take around 2 weeks to restore our broadband connection... no its not my router... its never been my router... never.

TalkTalk are potentially even worse. Their broadband goes down every other day for hours sometimes a whole day and each time you phone the New Delhi Tech support they provide a different reason (whilst they're shouting over you) and they always refuse to put me through to a manager (who might be in the UK). It isn't acceptable for me to be told that my broadband will be down until tomorrow when it comes back in a few minutes.

They even claim that I am not allowed to call support because I am using my own router rather than their USB modem.

Indian Culture is ruder (by British standards) than British in that they find it completely acceptable to shout whilst I am talking (never shouting) and generally knowingly (because they are not very good lies) lie about the reasons for outages. Nothing like the attractive pre-sales staff at TalkTalk based in the UK.

In theory then any company could set up and provide no service at all and at least take the first months fee plus a contract cancellation fee (£50 with TalkTalk AND you can only go to another service provider via BT).

I am going to try Telewest Broadband next because I have no other easy option as I need broadband every day for my work. In the past I have found Telewest Broadband to be quite unreliable too but that was over 4 years ago so maybe...

More and more service providers are offering free broadband or similar deals so I recommend people look for alternatives to TalkTalk... I wish there was a decent review web site out their.

Tallymanjohn

I'm with ntl, now joined up with Telewest, & have no problems (touch wood). The one time my modem went U/S, about a year ago, they brought a new one out next day. Can't remember last time we lost service & the speed is usually well up, even at peak times. It is a bit more expensive - £24.99 for uncapped 4meg line, but I'm happy to pay for reliability. Plus, being cable, using ethernet by default, it's a lot easier to set up routers, add machines etc.

TalkTalk, Sky etc. are probably fine for home users who don't rely on broadband, but for business use they are just no good, &, to be fair, they have never advertised as aiming at the business user.