New Talktalk poll; feedback needed, good and bad

morgie

Signed up back in April and got connected in June. No problems apart from 1 day without BB during cutover. Old ISP provided the MAC No. without delay. Never had any connection reliability issues so along with a wireless router allows me to work from home regularly using VPN over broadband. Bills have certainly been cheaper than my BT/Old ISP combination. Still waiting for LLU to get the full benefit.

Gemmadm

We ordered this in May 2006 and didn't hear anything until June when they asked for the change over code (can't remember what its called) from our current supplier. I got this straight away and phoned them up to give it the same day. A letter then arrived saying we would get it by the end of July. I didn't hear anything again until september when they emailed to say that they haven't received a code so I phoned them up. I had to be passed around a bit as no one knew what it was about. They said the code had expired as it was taking so long (their fault) so I said I was going to cancel it. It was December before this was sorted out and the account cancelled although we have to wait till after the next bill before we stop being charged
This so far has cost me a connection fee (29.99 i think), monthly charges for the talk 3 that you have to get to get the FREE broadband (approx £10 a month) and through all this I was still paying £21.99 a month to our normal broadband supplier (orange). From may this is nearly £200! I wised up in December and phoned up orange (who we have been with for a few years) and got free broadband through them as I have an orange phone contract. We got a higher speed connection and had nothing changed as we were already with them and it was all done over the phone straight away :j So in all I would not reccomend them at all.
Sorry for the long one, gem xx

abbecer

Steer well clear. We had no phone line for 6 weeks and had no internet for 3 weeks. This is on top of when it just goes down for a day at a time. We are just trying to claim compensation back and then will be changing.

Rebecca x

Andrea_wright

I became a new customer of Talk Talk just before christmas, leaving a perfectly good Tiscali.

I only have my phone line set up with them as yet, i was informed by the rep who set up the account i wouldnt have to pay anything untill at least January 2007.

I received my first bill on Friday 22nd December informing me that the first payment of £26.85 would be taken out of my a/c on the 27th December. I checked my a/c on line when i got home from work in the evening to find out the money had already come out of my a/c. Making me overdrawn as i hadnt put money into cover.So they took the money out of my a/c before i received the letter!!! Which is totally appalling.

I then had to wait till christmas eve to ring them as i worked on the Sat to find out what was going on. As i was concerened i would be charged by my bank. As it was Christmas holidays i couldnt do anything else about it untill the 27th. So i had this hanging over my head at christmas.

I had to increase my overdraft in order to cover the fees that had been charged as i had another direct debit coming out of the a/c.


To cut a long story short, after many phonecalls(at my expense) and stress. I have been informed that they wont be reimbursing me the £38 as i had plenty of time to get the money into my a/c.. Which is appalling as i had no idea when the first bill was due, it only states on letters from them that the bill s would be processed on the 13th of each month, and indication that it would come out of my a/c on the 27th.

I am going to go back to Tiscali as i had no proble,ms with them at all.

Rebob

We had to wait 2 months but we were switched on by the given date. The only thing was that it took a week for them to get back to us on a problem we had accessing the service but all other times we were dealt with promptly. Mostly we dealt with someone in england as I phoned a different number than the one that came as the help line with the start up (modem) pack. Sorry but I cannot find it at the mo. The main problem we had turned out to be a loose wire in the phone socket which they advised us to sort out ourselves as it would be more expensive for them to repair.

Cannot fault it now as it is cheaper and better than the service we used to have with Tesco.

Limestone_Cowboy

I signed up last year and when my 18 month contract is up in October I will be looking for alternatives. The reason being is that the connection is not stable and will disconnect whenever it feels (a problem never encountered with Orange), and the email service goes AWOL for days now and then. You get what you pay for, and as they took over AOL UK not so long ago, it is to be hoped that the AOL team will provide some know how to help talktalk get better.

xanderd

Applied and got connection in about 2 or 3 months. Thought that was too long but at least I had it and it was very cheap.

BUT had cnstant connection problems, sometimes would take 50 attemptsover an hour to connect, sometimes I would unexpectedly be disconnected.

THEN I informed them with 3 weeks notice that I would be moving house, no problems they said, it will be active when you move in. So I called them when I moved in, and although they had the note on their system from 3 weeks earlier, they had 'FORGOT' to do anything about it!!

I was furious but decided to wait the quoted 14 days for the phone line to come back. Called 2 weeks later and they couldnt process my order because i had 'given them the wrong telephone number'?! No I hadnt! They started all over again. 2 weeks later I called and they still hadnt started because 'BT had put a cease on our line'? Thye said they had requested it to be removed and I should call up again in 2 days to start the order. I called up again 2 days leter and an operatore said no problem, your order has been re-provisioned and you will have phone line in 2 weeks and broadband in 4 weeks.

A very long time, but at least I will have it. But I didnt!! The next operator told me that all the other operators had 'misunderstood the problem' and that I wasnt eligible to habve their services until I held a BT line at the new address for at least 3 months!! I cancelled the service and am now filing a court claim under the supply of goods and serviecs act.

Their Terms and conditins state that e-mail is an acceptable form of complaint but they just sent automated rpelies to my complaints which didnt adress the issues - it was like they hadnt even read my emails! So frustrating!

I was left without a phone line or the internet for 10 weeks and had to call the repeatedly. Nobody gave me the same answer and I was only told at the end that I couldnt have their service at all! if thye said that to start with I would have been fine - BT got my line back in 30 minutes and madasafish got me broadband in 5 days!

They are cluless and have no infrastructure to support themselves

JohnHB_2

Joined their "free broadband" offer at the outset. We were already with TalkTalk for Broadband so the switch was seamless. However, never recieved the modem I should have got (Didn't matter because I had two USB modem and now have a wireless router anyway). Took a few phone calls to get them to uprate the speed to 2.2MBps. I am told the full 8 MBps will arrive about March. (Again, doesn't matter because 2MBps is massive anyway)
A few problems along the line. The main one was the connection kept on dropping after they upped the speed. The cause was that the wiring was picking up stray signals and the noise was disrupting the Broadnband signal. The customers services were useless, but the (expensive) technical line people sorted me out easily. The solution was to have the router on the FIRST socket in the house and run an extension cable to the router, rather than use it from an extension socket.
The TalkTalk bill is £20 to £30 a month depending on how much I can limit the family ringing BigBrother or mobile phones. This includes the whole package so represents VERY good value for us.

darrenackers

I must share my awful experiance with talktalk. I joined about 2 years ago when they had an unlimited bb £15/month offer on. They continiually got my bill wrong charing me £20 a month instead of £15, where I was constantly ringing them up asking to be credited the amount back and to sort it out.

When they rolled out this 'free' broadband back in June 06, the speed and service went very poor so I decided to leave believing 'you get what you pay for' and moved to another ISP offering the same deal, but with a reputation for being much faster.

I cancelled my BB in June, and they sent me a confirmation letter saying it would be done in July as they say you need to give 30 days notice. This is definatly a ploy to earn another months pay from you and nothing else as transfer of service should only take a few days.

After July, they kept sending me bills, and I kept ringing them up saying I'd cancelled and could they stop sending me bills and clear the account of any money I owed them. Each time I rang them up it took ages to get through and all the call centres were clearly in india, as none of them really understood what I wanted them to do.

I left it as I thought I'd already recieved the confirmation letter, so they'll sort it out. Anyway last month I recieved a letter from a credit company saying I owed talktalk £40. So again I phoned up talktalk explaining what had gone on, which took quite a while as their indian call center staff are useless. Again, I was promised that the account had been cancelled and cleared, I also rang up the credit company expalining. They said this happens a lot as there seems to be a problem with the talktalk cancelling system.

Thinking that was the end of it (you'd think I'd learnt by now, it wouldn't be) I get another letter threatening me that court action would be taken. I ring both companies up again. The credit company were very good and said they'd cancel the account at their end but I needed to get talktalk to tell them to contact them. I called talktalk, and they said it takes 30 days to clear an account, so should be done soon, in which they will then contact the credit company telling them of the account.

Jeez, why does it take 30 days to clear an account that's been in active for 6 months and the charges on the account arn't valid?

Anyone hopeing to get free BB with talktalk, DON'T!!! Stay well away, they are useless and you honestly 'get what you pay for' which in talktalk terms is nothing!

sly666

TalkTalk SUCK!
Exactly the same problems as the previous post.
I left them Jan 06, and moved to a different supplier using their PUK code.
They continued to bill me until Dec 06!!!
Then sent me threatening letters when i didnt pay!
Customer services are totaly useless, i rang them 10+ times to get it sorted. Usualy you dont get through, but when i did each time they promised me the problem is solved, Only to get another bill or letter a few days later!

In my opinion we should all sue TalkTalk for our time and stress in sorting out their obvious ploy to make more money out of people after they have cancelled.
MAKE SURE YOU CANCEL YOUR DIRECT DEBIT AS SOON AS THEY COLLECT THE LAST BILL!

When it did work though, download speeds were terrable, They also block ports to slow down peer to peer downloads.
Phone bills were always wrong too.

Avoid at all costs!

i am now with Telewest cable, a few teething problems but the fastest internet speeds i've ever had! (and i've tried a few now!) They also managed to transfer my existing landline number too.