Right to cancel Talk Talk

esutg

One month ago i joined talk talk on their phone and broadband package. Since i moved in i have not used the phoneline so had to pay £50 to talktalk who then instructed bt openreach to reactivate the line for me. For the first 4 days phone and broadband were working fine. But then after we were getting an unstable connection with the broadband dropping on and off every hour. A talk talk engineer came and inspected the line but in the end changed the router. That was last week and not only have the broadband dropped (i have no connection for 2 days) the phone has no dialing tone either (no incoming/outgoing calls). Now i do not know whether this is talk talk fault or dodgy bt installation but i have had enough.

What rights do i have to cancel as i am in 12 month contract? And secondly if i did will i get my line rental saver back? (i stupidly paid 12 month line rental in advance)

Buzby

None. Your line is provided by BT (Openreach) and if there is a service issue then they are required to fix it.

TT should rebate you for any period the service does not work as advertised, but there is no way you can summarily terminate the contract and walk away without major hassles.

esutg

That is sad to hear. I thought maybe that if talk talk were not delivering an adequate service since the onset and they have had a month to sort it then they would be breaking something in their SLA agreement in my contract. I have plenty of evidence of how many disconnections and non service from screenshots of the router sumaary page.

Should i contact bt openreach? Or is talktalk to blame? I am a bit stuck now as the only option talk talk give me is send another engineer (chargeable).

macman

No, you cannot contact BT OR. TT are your line rental provider and you must go through them. However it is OR who will do the actual work. TT do not have engineers, they supply a fairly useless 3rd party service (which is chargeable), but they can only work on your equipment, not on a line fault.
If there is no dial tone from the master socket then clearly it is a line fault, and you need to report it as such (do not mention any broadband faults), and stress to TT that you need a BT OR engineer to sort it. This is only chargeable if the fault is on your line or equipment.
TT will do all they can to avoid this in case OR attempt to charge them back if no fault found, so you have to be persistent.
If you cancel with this fault present, then the fault will still be there with any new provider-and you would be charged the full ETC.

esutg

Ok, so I finally convinced Talk Talk to instruct a BT Openreach engineer to come and have a look at the line (still no phone for a week now). They still explained all that BS about if the fault is inside the house it will be chargeable. However, even though I think the fault is more likely to be between the half a mile between our house and the telephone exchange than the 30cm my line goes from the master socket to the edge of the house, we will see. And of course I will argue that since it was a BT Openreach engineer who installed/reactivated the line a month ago, when I joined Talk Talk, it was the faulty installation that caused this, so why am I paying to clean up their faulty installation.

Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

ktothema

Do you have a cordless or corded phone? Sky advised us a while ago the it's best to keep a corded one aside just in case, so we shouldn't get charged erroneously. We just have a cheapy tesco value one in a cupboard. If you only have a cordless, I'd suggest doing a similar thing just in case. At least then they can't blame your phone.

Which was the first thing a BT guy did when our line had issues after installation. He wasn't happy when we produced the corded phone and showed the problem still existed. Oddly it turned out the original engineer hadn't connected our phone line at all, he'd just put a faceplate onto our soon to be disconnected virgin line (we'd never realised we'd been using an extension in the house and the plate originally on it said BT so we'd never questioned it). When virgin cancelled the line, the phone service disappeared oddly!