TalkTalk boasts of fourplay-loving customers, extreme growth While the battle lines are being drawn up between BT-EE and Vodafone over selling you great big lumps of TV, broadband, fixed and mobile phones, TalkTalk has been in the quadplay game for ages. The telco, which was spun out of Carphone Warehouse in 2010, has announced its last quarter (third quarter, full year 2015) figures, …
Well, my office TalkTalk line's unusably poor; their excuse is that 40 Gb per month, on an "unlimited" business package, is so high their network can't cope. (Not my choice, needless to say.) Suspiciously cheap - but bad enough the MD's finally considering coughing up the hefty early termination fee to get a proper ISP even before the contract is up.
For mobile, they're just resellers, so presumably it's all up to the real network doing the work - but for broadband? Hopeless.
I'm sure the horror stories are correct for many, but for me, they are fine. They are cheap, I get 14 -18 Mb from an unbundled adsl line, and it's as reliable as anyone else I've ever tried. And I've tried many, back as far as Pipex (who's progeny are now part of Talk Talk apparently). They are also quite malleable with regards price. If you are paying rate card, you shouldn't be. I'd actually recommend them. Honestly, I would. One caveat to my endorsement : I'm 150 yds from my telephone exchange. In my experience, line length is king for ADSL. One might argue that Frank Spencer could provide a reliable broadband service at that distance to the exchange.
Well although I appreciate that YMMV, but....
I'm the same distance now as i was when we subscribed to Tiscali (you can see where this is going, right?) which at the time was my wife's employer's preference. It was slow but stable, I'm talking about 1.5mbps here. Over the first year it crept up to more like 2, and we were content; that's what we'd get.
TalkTalk buy them out and lo! Dropouts constantly, both of ADSL and voice (especially in wet weather, which may have given a clue it wasn't a problem in our house). Refusal to acknowledge probems, instead it was always the same script ending with 'we'll monitor your line'. Eventually through other methods BT came out and swapped the line from the pole to our house. Increase in speed to 3, but still dropouts. TalkTalk couldn't care and were hopeless in even wanting to address the problem was on the line, as then they'd be responsible.
Switched to Plusnet fibre and am very pleased with speed and service, which deserves special mention. And costs ~£5 / month more, which is cheap compared to TalkTalk's increasing TCO. And I'll be amazed if that churn rate doesn't increase, I bet the figures have been massaged and that swallowing up Tesco's 150,000 subscribers have tilted the balance somewhat.
I hate to not be on the TalkTalk hating bandwagon as much as the next man....however, aside from having to get them to retrain my broadband in the first couple of weeks (the support forum people seem quite on the ball... never tried the bods on phone support) i've never had any issues with them.
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