"Falls in customer volume" isnt that the same as??? "customers are leaving us"
TalkTalk loses 43,000 customers, chunk o' revenue in Q3
TalkTalk lost 43,000 broadband customers during the company's third quarter and reported that revenue in that area of the business had fallen year-on-year. The telco told the City this morning that it was continuing to unbundle exchanges during the quarter and attributed the decline in subscribers to the fact that it was …
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 12:10 GMT Sir Sham Cad
One less now
So, after being happy with Homechoice (apart from the self-cooking set top boxes) and then happy with Tiscali when they borged HC and, for a time, being happy with TalkTalk when they snaffled Tiscali I'm finally jumping ship and having Virgin Media come round to hook me up.
Why am I jumping ship now after all this time? Simple. My "broadband" speed hasn't gotten over 700kb/s for the last month and was usually 300-500kb/s. Consistently depending on time of day and day of the week. When iPlayer doesn't work and you can't watch 2 minute YouTube clips without waiting for five minutes for it to download then the connection is not fit for purpose (Yeah, I know. First World Problems etc...).
I don't know whether this is a policy that's been suddenly implemented across the TalkTalk network, local contention issues in my area or if the TalkTalk to Internet bandwidth has just gone to ratshit but I do know that TalkTalk consider 300kb/s+ to be "acceptable" and I do not. If others are experiencing the same problems as me then no wonder they're losing customers hand over fist.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 12:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
I used to be with Tiscali
After Talk Talk took over and the service disappeared down the tubes I phoned up to cancel, the bloke on the other just sounded fed up with it, I assume he was fielding a slew of calls a day. So Talk talk bought a whole new customer base only to lose them due to their own ineptitude overnight.
Saying that I've been with Virgin since and up until the last 2 weeks the network had been faultless, since then both phone and broadband have been up and down like Richard Branson in a room full of Virgin Air hostesses (the one's with MG's obv).
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 12:51 GMT SiempreTuna
TalkTalk? LieLie more like ..
I spent ages looking for the best deal, (foolishly) signed up with TalkTalk and .. they increased the price in the FIRST MONTH!
Having said that, those of you who have signed up with Virgin need to keep an eye on your bills. I let the missus look after things, only to discover that after 3 years, they'd increased the price from £25/month to £38/month.
That's an average price increase of around 23% a year.
Clearly, the fastest thing about Virgin are the price increases.
And they kept pulling TV stations.
Not sure who to go with next, but it's definitely neither of the above ..
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 13:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
No illegal interception...
"Does the choice given to the new customers include stopping the illegal interception..."
It's not illegal, else the government/Ofcom would have halted it, rather than (as article shows) a Minister praising the system.
Every ISP has a big anonymous list of sites its network sends request to, just like every telco has a big list of phones numbers that its network gets asked to reach.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 13:35 GMT dephormation.org.uk
Home Safe
You cannot avoid the surveillance, only decline the filtering.
Unauthorised interception without consent of sender and recipient is a criminal offence. Yet the Police and ICO will not protect you.
Thus if you value the privacy/security/integrity of your communications... you need to move to a trustworthy ISP.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 13:40 GMT Chris D Rogers
Too much anti TalkTalk
My folks became TalkTalk customers after it took over a few smaller players and were not on any contract, just making a monthly payment for a 8mb download speed, actual speed is just under 5mb and upload speed under 1mb.
At Christmas I rang customer services to make a complaint, it transpired I was in the wrong, the chap I was talking too, for all the shit I gave him was polite and helpful - indeed, not only did he sign us up for a 12 month contract lower than existing plan, he also helped considerably in changing email addresses .
I had no complaints, having looked at TalkTalk combined broadband and telephone services, it transpired they were the UK's cheapest, further, line rental that had actually increased under TalkTalk was reduced to a respectable £9.50 per month if a 12 month advance payment was made - actual cost saving to parents was more than £80.00 per annum.
For this, my folks get a reasonable service all for under £13.00 per month, this includes a capped download of 40G per month, this can be upped for a £5.00 pm additional charge.
As someone who actually knows what an awful service is, I live in Hong Kong in a remote area and local Telco Netvigator are possibly one of the worst in the world - my folks UK service is actually far better and costs less per month and the difference is stark.
Given I'm a big downloader, I'm glad to say, following 8 weeks in the UK and having fled more than 100G, utilised iPlayer in SD and HD, TalkTalk imposed no additional charges.
For what you pay, and what you get, they really are good - yes i could get a bit higher download speed, yes i could go unlimited, yes i could sign up for load of useless media options like Virgin - in reality, a telephone line, decent broadband link, and reasonable DL cap for average user is all people want, and on this account TalkTalk excel.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 13:41 GMT Callum
I was a nildram customer; which became Opal and then talktalkbusiness. The service with talktalk business is utterly awful. e.g. they have failed three times in a row to log an openreach call to replace a master socket. It's so bad that I have a draytek vigor router with a "3" 3G usb key plugged in permanently to switch when the contention rates rise in the evening (which bugs me because I'm meant to be a business customer and shielded from evening consumer usage)
Anyone got any recommendations for a ADSL broadband provider that works for techies. i.e. not the watered down crap service that seems to be the norm. I don't care about price.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 14:10 GMT Richard Crossley
ADSL Recommendation
Zen ADSL
http://www.zen.co.uk/business/broadband/business-broadband.aspx?page=53
They cost a bit, but their technical staff are pretty good. They don't do unbundled.
I would still be using them if BT could have fixed their infrastructure. My line = 1500 Mbs, next door = 4500 Mbs
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 15:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
I've found..
Fast ISP to be very good, pricey, but excellent service and excellent speeds.
Talk Talk is quite possibly the most obnoxious and ineffective company I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. Leave them to the x-factor-tards the advertise for and move to someone who understands what your problem is when your upload speed is 10 times faster than your download speeds on ADSL....
For the guy who was getting 300kbs, I was suffering... 30 - 50kbs from Talk Talk.
Awful beyond words.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 17:01 GMT Philscompany
I'd recommend Eclipse Broadband having used them a lot for various clients plus my own broadband - not the cheapest, but helpful support staff who know their stuff and don't force you to run through all the basic checks you've already done if there is a problem. Somewhat unusually, they're totally happy to pass apparent line faults on to BT if it becomes necessary (Tiscali more or less flat refused to last time it was required) but they also stay on top of the call while it's open and see it through to completion.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 14:13 GMT Keith 12
Just about to finish an 18 month contract with Talk Talk. (Fibre cabinets just installed 25 metres away but NOT impressed with the 2mb max. up speed on offer, mulling a decision to move to BT for the 10mb up) At 6km from the exchange we get around 4mb down and 950k+ up. Online gaming pings are frequently around the 30 - 40 mark. Approx 2 hours downtime in 2 incidents of about 1 hour each over the last 18 months.On initial activation, Forum requests concerning poor gaming pings were answered and fixed within 24 hours.
Was very wary about moving to Talk Talk - I have to say I remain very impressed.
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 17:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Buying ISPs and losing customers..
They bought up the ISP I was with before, and said ISP went down the crapper, capped everything, even iPlayer became for all intents useless for HD streams, WOW updates (and gameplay) painful. Customer service said it was a BT problem, BT quite expectedly said it was TalkTalk
So if you factor in the customers they've aquired from other ISPs, and they're still down on numbers then one can only conclude they're doing something very wrong and that matches my experience perfectly. I wonder if they've retained any customers from ISP purchases, or if they all jumped ship?
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Tuesday 7th February 2012 22:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Talk-Talk are so bad ...
that my 80 year old mother-in-law was complaining about the poor service levels, frequent dropouts, and an inability to access things like MS Messenger. Given the extortionate monthly fee they were trousering for her (out in the sticks) sub-1Mbps connection, we thought it only right to help her switch (to PlusNet), and now everything's fine and dandy, connection seems faster even, and it's less than half the price. The final clincher was the way Talk-Talk cut off her connection the same day as they issued the MAC code. Sharp practice indeed.