BT Vision beats rivals to honour of being worst UK Pay-TV

"BT pointed out to The Register that its telly service is dependent on the quality of customers' Freeview reception and broadband"

Guess who supplies most broadband via ADSL? they only have themselves to blame!

Signal quality

"BT pointed out to The Register that its telly service is dependent on the quality of customers' Freeview reception and broadband, as opposed to the other big boys in television Sky and Virgin Media, who deliver via satellite dish and cable respectively."

Obviously someone who has never tried to watch Sky during a thunderstorm or snow or even a heavy shower.

BT Vision can relax for the next set of Ofcom results...

We have the YouView launch finally on the horizon you all know which ISP is heavily involved with that. I'll say no more!

I liked the extra info on the BBC....

....that stated they had paid over £730 million for 114 football matches over 3 years. That would get you 18-20 years of F1 which could be a total of 400 races. With 700k customers thats at least a grand over 3 years for each one just to break even. Whomever signed that deal must have got one of the biggest backhanders in history.

BT and billing

Yeah, well that affects their services across the board - having just struggled through our annual fight with them over our phone line's alleged "loyalty discount", screwed up every damn year. It's only because there are no clear cut better alternatives that they earn this loyalty by default.

Not much sympathy...

"BT pointed out to The Register that its telly service is dependent on the quality of customers' Freeview reception and broadband, as opposed to the other big boys in television Sky and Virgin Media, who deliver via satellite dish and cable respectively."

Very true, and freeview signals can be patchy, but *YOU* are the ones charging that monthly rent on the 50 year old corroded pair the customers broadband has to struggle along!

Talktalk not bad for me

I went talktalk as there were a lot cheaper than BT and BT/Openreach didn't have ADSL2 at my local exchange. No complaints here, I've had far more hassles with arrogant BT over the years.

Talk Talk

I had nearly a month of dodgy broadband, eventually tracked down to dodgy cabling. To be fair once I'd got past the 1st line overseas monkeys, the engineers were pretty good, but the whole thing was hamstrung because the support of the line was BT Openreach, and so every visit and report back involved bouncing around waiting for third parties to do their stuff!

On the upside I did eventually get a great line (now getting 11Mbps, 6Mbps previously!), and a hefty discount for 6 months after I complained 8-)

TalkTalk would be a joke, but they've not improved enough.

I have an email (several in fact) from "techsupport@talktalk.co.uk" which say (and I quote) "we are unable to help you from this helpdesk regarding technical issues."

Not surpring really. These are the cretins who kept insisting that issues with FTP login to update webspace content was a problem with email. (Took 5 months or so to sort that out and, even then, had a followup call a few months later to apologise for the time taken to resolve my [non existent] "email problem").

Took them about the same time to get a working direct debit set up as well, despite everything else being in order..

Oh, and they have quite a reputation for "issues" with logging your marketing preferences. They will phone to sell you aonther contract/product etc., despite what your preferrences say.

They are also utterly unable to confirm a marketing call is genuinely from TalkTalk BEFORE you confirm any personal data. For that, they go the same way as any other potential scammer: They get the most insane runaround I can think of for as long as I can keep from laughing.

0.72 complaints about TalkTalk per 1,000 customers

... that'll be cause the rest of the 1000 customers either gave up trying to complain months earlier or are still stuck somewhere in the dark recesses of talk talk's telephone support system.

TalkTalk

Worst provider by far, claiming to be getting better but have just closed their CEO office in Warrington (the people who actually deal with the complaints) and relocated it to Stornoway because it's cheaper, where they are so short on number some of the staff actually turned up for their interview in their school uniform they are that young. And they have closed their Northampton site which houses their sales compliance teams, (the other rout you would take if you wanted to complain)... So a company clearly not doing anything to prevent complaints.

Then there's TV coming which will drive in many more complaints that they are not prepared for, and now have no staff to deal with them. Oh and the thousands of customers that have broadband but are also being billed for dial up...

A few friends of mine that have called up have had massive credits thrown at them rather than actually fixing their problem because they are getting so many calls and don't have time for that kind of stuff, so looks like a good time to be calling them.

Hmm, still not as bad as in Germany

German Sky, aka Premiere, often refuses to accept cancellations. They simply don't pick up the letter.

Their program consists of sports (mandatory in all packages), a random selection of films (about what you get on Film 4, but often in a lower technical quality) and some re-run channels. They have no original programming. They used to have original programming in the 1990s, but now it's just a wasteland.

Ohh and getting rid of Junkmail

In Germany we have a pretty bad cable company called "Kabel Deutschland". They mostly stay in business because landlords have blanket agreements with them forcing the people to pay for their "services". Their services include analogue TV channels with audio breakdowns for days which nobody even considers fixing.

Anyhow they want people to sign up for ludicrous ideas like broadband cable Internet. For this they regularly send mail addressed to the building... What I did to stop this is simple. I offered them an offer they could refuse. I wrote a letter saying them that reading their mail causes certain costs and that I can no longer do that for free. That's why I made them an offer for a technical opinion on the contents of their letter. They could have 1000 Euros per letter, or the comfortable flat-rate package of 10k per year. All they need to accept the flat-rate do is to continue sending me such mail after a certain date. To make sure I'm serious, I wrote them a free sample of the work they would get. I haven't heard of them since then. :)

Talk Talk - pah!

I had Pipex Business Broadband in my office. Pipex got bought out by Tiscali (and the alarm bells started to tinkle a bit...), but service was still good, low contention, good speeds all day (I did a lot of work in the evening with no drop in quality). Then TalkTalk bought Tiscali and announced that they were upgrading our service to use their backhauls, etc... Being on a ADSL2 exchange at the time, not a 2+ I had a solid 8Mb, with a throughput of up to 6.8Mbit/s with Pipex pretty well all day. After TalkTalk's "upgrade", the day performance rarely exceeded 4.6Mbit, and the evening performance was typically 360Kbit/sec. What's more they insisted that they could upgrade me to their up-to-24Mbit service, even though our exchange wasn't due for upgrade to 21CN for 18 months. They tried to blame my line, the exchange, all sorts of things. In the end I asked them to leave my life and signed up with another business grade ISP, and as if by magic, my line performance is back to, and if not better than, how it was with Pipex. It took quite a few attempts to get rid of TalkTalk, from asking them to go, it took three months for them to acknowledge the fact and tell me that "in 30 days your service will terminate", and a further 90 days for it to actually happen! I think they've gone now.....

And as for 3 - I've been a customer of theirs since the day they launched, I am a "Founder", and never once have I had cause to complain. When I've had to call them, I've resolved everything with just one call. I think I've called them three times since March 2003. Compare that to o2, who I used for a business shared contract, we seem to be on the phone to them regularly! Though, they do, on the whole, sort stuff out well.