Talk Talk

[moggyadventurer]

Hi

Has anyone transferred their call and broadband from bt to talk talk?

Any problems etc.

grateful of any thoughts

[simmitc]

I did, both phone and Broadband. I stuck it for three months and then moved everything back to BT. Over the years I've had a few very serious professional run-ins with BT, but Talk Talk are in a completely different league. If you do go with them and then switch back, make sure that you cancel the DD in favour of Talk Talk. Of course, they might have got a lot better since I tried them.

[bmcecosse]

They advertise like mad around here - but when I ask, the story is that the exchange has limited capacity, but as a favour for an extra £15 per month they could 'fit me in'....... I am with Orange and it works well - but shortly after I moved to them they upped the cost quite significantly and so I am thinking of moving to BT with their winter 'deal'....

[phurn]

talk talk are frankly awfull. as are bt, and anyone else who uses bt lines. they use the same exchanges so dont buy into any of that nonsense, the problem comes from the fact theyre using aging copper wire architecture, ok bt are slowly changing this but its still not good enough, the exchanges cant handle the work load, these were designed in the 60's for phone calls. thats a hell of a lot less traffic to contend with, thats aside from the inductive problems you get from the miles and miles of copper cable.

in truth, for decent connection you need virgin media, ok the service is alot worse than when it was blueyonder... but its streets ahead of anyone else.

[les]

I'm with talk talk, they don't seem too bad, but I'm not a computer wiz kid! As with most things folk who have trouble say things are crap, those who have no trouble say things are ok.

[RobMoore]

I moved to TalkTalk from Sky who were constantly screwing my connection up 4 months in and glad I moved

[chickenjohn]

Hi

Has anyone transferred their call and broadband from bt to talk talk?

Any problems etc.

grateful of any thoughts

DON"T DO IT!

Talk talk = absolute nightmare.

Cheap, yes, but also very very nasty. I have a number of friends who have had bad experiences with Talk Talk internet. I've just changed my internet. I used to be with a small and very good company called "Nildram"- no problems at all for years, sadly they were taken over by Tiscali a few years ago and immediately the service got worse and I had a number of problems. This got even worse when talk talk took over Tiscali. I can no longer update the webspace I had with Nildram and there is nothing that Talk Talk/ Opal will do. Also, the internet speed has got slower and slower.

Following multiple problems and the 30min+ waits for a human to speak to on their "help" lines I have set in motion moving provider- and Talk talk are even useless at this- why five day wait just to get a blasted MAC code?????
At various times, thanks to Talk Talk/Opal I was not able to post to certain forums, including this one. Due to their setting of MTU requirement, which they did not tell me about.

Worse than useless......

[MarkyB]

I'm with Talk talk and have been for ages.
After initial nightmares with their call centre it has been fine.

The catch I've found is that if you have a phone line with them then you can only go back to BT, nobody else is interested in taking over the line.

[Jefftav]

I am with AOL for broadband and have been for years with no real problems. AOL are now offering a package inc phone calls, line rental and U/L broadband for 22.99 with 2 months free. I am think of transferring as BT have just been a nightmare ever since they installed a line into our house they have constantly got the bills wrong and customer service is terrible.

Rant over

[rayofleamington]

I was with Virgin for TV, broadband and phone. The technical support was good, although their installation engineers were awful and not good at telling the truth (installed at 2 houses - both were a total farce). Second installation we got a second hand non-recordable TV box. We left Virgin when they refused to reduce the package price (despite being told we were leaving), and we got a much better deal with Sky. Immediately AFTER we left Virgin and had signed with Sky (24 hours), Virgin also offered a much better deal

Sky has been ok apart from the broadband. They use the BT, line and BT were in no rush to "install it" (despite it already being installed) and had been running 12 months earlier on BT broadband. It took 8 weeks until a BT engineer (technician) turned up - they turned it on remotely (takes 30 seconds) and technician says 'that works now'. After the phone line was operational, it took another month before the SKY broadband was up and running. (3 months offline ... that's apparently normal and I don't recommend to try it if you're used to being online!).
Initially we had nearly 10mbps connection speed, but mysteriously after a couple of months we didn't get anything like that - sometimes so slow that I couldn't open the web page to test the download speed check
Sky TV - absolutely fabulous. We've had to reset the box maybe once every 3 months (some people get more trouble with that) and the recording capacity of the HD+ box is amazing (we got the HD+ box without a HD subscription as they now have ane even better one for the HD customers)

I'm about to get a phone line reconnected in a rental property - I bet that if it goes with BT directly, it won't take them 8 weeks to organise it...

[irmscher]

Talk Talk thats what they are broadband always going down and they dont give you the band width they promise and blame it on where you live. BT shortly getting a new contract as TalkTalk are getting the boot

[chickenjohn]

They should be made to rename to "All Talk Talk and No Trousers".

[irmscher]

thats true

[d_harris]

I have limited experience of talk talk and certainly dont intend to deal with them again

[Matt]

i think generally the small people that you havent nesesairily heard of are better...

we used to be with tiscalli and the downtime/very slow connection was horrendous, we are now with eclipse and its a lot better (although we do get slow speeds occasionally) I think the issues are now down to the exchange rather than the supplier

[chickenjohn]

i think generally the small people that you havent nesesairily heard of are better...

we used to be with tiscalli and the downtime/very slow connection was horrendous, we are now with eclipse and its a lot better (although we do get slow speeds occasionally) I think the issues are now down to the exchange rather than the supplier

That's very true! I had brilliant reliable fast broadband with Nildram. The trouble is, as happened to my provider, the small fish get eaten up by the bigger sharks.

Have now moved to a small provider in hope of better service. For a while after the Opal/Talk Talk takeover I could not post to many forums, some would work and some not with no rhyme or reason, I also could not open Ebay for weeks. Not great if you are trying to sell stuff!

[polo2k]

I think that the way that all the smaller companies work is that they buy an allocation of bandwidth on the BT lines. (this will naturally be to second priority to the BT requirements). Then once the company gets going and has the bandwith available, they throw some money at ads and get customers. These customers quickly use up the bandwidth and hopefully the revenue from them pays for more bandwidth before they go for round 2 of the ads

this whole process is like buying a house, one broken link in the chain and it all goes pear shaped. This could be a rates increase, bad paying customers, prise wars (squeezing profits).

So to try and keep the customers happy they will always stay one step ahead on bandwidth to that it doesnt slow down with each wave of customers. Bandwidth costs money so they have less/cheaper staff, this is ok till the network goes down once and the skeleton staff get overworked, then the reputation is gone and they cant keep customers, then profits drop off and it all goes south from there.

I used to work selling a piece of kit that did WAN optimisation. this basically compresses data before it goes across a long distance connection. This means that the same lines can move more data. This tech came in hardware and software, if one of the ISP`s would strike a deal on this kind of tech then they could have a "hub" at the main exchanges and then simply a program running on every users PC then everyone would get faster speeds.

Im sure they have their reasons

[santadawes]

We were with Virgin for many years. we started having problems with them and their rubbish customer services. We switched to BT. We were prommised a good rate on our Broad band but that failed to arise. We had cause for them to come to sort out a dreadfull phone line. The problem was down at the exchange but 4 mths later we received a bill for 2 callout charges. We questioned this with their customer services and were told that the problem was at our fault and we were given a £75 reduction on our bill but were told WE HAD to pay or they would be taking us to court. I then went to Talk Talk who after 12mths of trouble free service are happy to be a customer. We did have a BT rep call to ask if we wanted to switch back and in a florish of words told him to go and Jump....

[chickenjohn]

After 2 years of gradually worsening service and appalling customer service and parts of my original package being lopped off without letting me know (like the ability to update my websites) and numerous problems, and lately, very slow and glitchy broadband, I have just today completed the move to Plusnet.

I have to say, compared to the slow Talk talk, the internet on Plusnet is fast again, webpages open snappily where they used to drag, video clips from the web load and run INSTANTLY (under Talk Talk, I was used to having to wait). Fingers crossed the great performance will continue. BTW, I did not choose to go to Talk Talk, the excellent company I was with previously were swallowed up and then the service deteriorated bit by bit under Talk talk, glad I'm shot of that useless bunch.