so talk talk still provide the worst service?
END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH: TalkTalk no longer worst ISP in UK
Even Ofcom was surprised to report today that TalkTalk is no longer the UK's number one most bitched about broadband provider. In a sign that the world may actually end this Friday, TalkTalk was ingloriously pushed into second place by Orange. TalkTalk, headed up by one-time jockey Dido Harding, saw its horse finish second in …
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Possibly.
These statistics are drawn only from people who complain direct to Ofcom (complaining to TalkTalk or the Ombudsman don't count here). TalkTalk have a policy to refuse to answer any question on how to complain to Ofcom. This is even taken to the extent that if you post Ofcom's phone number or web address on their support forums (http://www.talktalkmembers.com/forums/) it will be silently deleted - seriously, go and have a shot :-/
All this says is that they have managed to reduce the number of people calling Ofcom or filling in the form on their website.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Possibly.
"All this says is that they have managed to reduce the number of people calling Ofcom or filling in the form on their website."
Reminds me of a "Quality" training course many years ago. The team exercise was to reduce the number of complaints left by customers to a hypothetical hotel. The winning team's solution was to stop taking any bookings. The lecturer cried foul - but admitted they hadn't broken any of the rules he had set for the exercise.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 14:07 GMT Nuke
@MikeHuk (Talktalk Salesman?) - Re: Can't be that bad
Wrote :- "I joined Talktalk when they started and have always have had good service, particularly as they were the first to introduce really low cost broadband!"
I smell a Talktalk salesman - this post sounds like stuff straight from the sales training course. The exclamation mark is a particualr give-away.
Would you happen to be the PoS Talktalk salesman who phoned me, despite my number being on the Telephone Preference Service exclusion list, and (a) Pretended that he had never heard of the TPS; and then (b) claimed that Talktalk was entilted to cold-call BT customers because (as he pretended) it was some kind of BT subsidiary?
I sent a formal complaint about Talktalk to the TPS but of course they do nothing. As least I managed to frighten the bar steward by the time I finished with him.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 17:00 GMT Nuke
Re: @MikeHuk (Talktalk Salesman?) - Can't be that bad
Wrote :- "I am in fact a retired NHS Nurse and have no connection with Talktalk."
Accepted, and apologies, but do try to avoid posts that sound like sales hype. I am happy with Demon as an ISP, but I know others have had trouble with it and I don't think anyone would think I sound like a salesman of theirs.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: No surprise there
I had to go as far as filing a Small Claims court action against Orange (yes I know that's not the proper name for the court).
I was supposed to get free VoIP calls to Europe but the morons couldn't grasp the concept the reason it didn't work was they had the wrong MAC address for my Router in the DB (they even told me the one they had) and apparently it's very complex to change.
Another arrogant little prick of a script monkey told me when I threatened to sue for the non existent service "Our lawyers will be better than yours, so I wouldn't bother"
One letter later and all was resolved i.e. got full refund + expenses and left the contract, Amazing what a letter from a court can do.
Been with O2 who's service has been fantastic.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 15:46 GMT wowfood
Re: No surprise there
We got a call from orange, offering us a new deal which was cheaper than our current one and would enable ADSL2+ so we could get a higher connection speed so we took it.
BUT apparently we aren't in an orange area anymore, and due to the change in contract we were subject to the "not in our area fee" and where we changed our phone line to orange, we again recieved a second "not in our area fee" from the bastards.
It then took nearly an hour on the phone to get through to somebody to sort this crap out. And even then it didn't get sorted because my step dad (buy who pays the bills" accepted their bullshit "we'll refund you the first 6 months" offer they gave him, not thinking that we'll need to change back to a BT line which costs a shit load and the fact that it still makes orange money.
I've been nagging him for the past few years to change to a half decent provider (best down here is sky) but still nothing
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 11:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
PlusNet
Even PlusNet, who are usually very good, ruffled my feathers in attempting to offer a fibre broadband without lookup to my rural address, wasting my time waiting on a BT engineer telling me at 8.30pm that I was too far from the exchange, trying to charge me for a fibre service, then trying to double the price of the basic broadband as they "didn't realise I resided so far from the exchange".
Or are they bundled in with the BT complaints?
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 09:19 GMT Ambivalous Crowboard
Re: Three accounts with Zen
I disagree completely. I left them because:
- they kept returning 1 in 10 emails because my sender DNS domain "didn't exist" (they didn't see how this was a problem on their network, not mine)
- their line speed was very poor, after a few complaints I left and went to BT Business and they said "oh yeah, your router's MTU is wrong, it should be this..."
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 12:33 GMT Tony Paulazzo
Re: You get what you pay for
Three accounts with Zen. No complaints at all. You really do get what you pay for.
With all due respect, nonsense, I've got a BT account, paying half what I should (£23 a month inc line rental for unlimited downloads with 16Mb speed - just ask for your MAC code towards the end of the first year contract and it's amazing what they can suddenly offer you.)
P2p might be slowed in the eve, but I just do that overnight, no problems with online gaming or BBCi / 4OD (living in the wilds of west Yorkshire so hills and green - no option for Virgin cable).
Admittedly, I do live less than a mile from a recently upgraded exchange, but even at 6Mbs before I had few complaints.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
All of BT's problems could be solved as follows...
1. Ditch the off shore call centres. I fully expect the first few tiers of a call centre to be... let's say... disinterested and disengaged, but no-one at BT's call centres fully understands or can really speak English. And they certainly don't know about broadband or telephones.
2. Ditch the Home Hub 3 and stop running misleading ads about it: it doesn't have the 'best ever' wifi signal, smart wireless doesn't work, lease renewal doesn't work, and the router is buggy as hell. It does look quite nice though.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:20 GMT paulf
Re: talktalk 'accidentally' charged us for two accounts over 3 years...
The linked tweet shows they owed £3259.61.
You should have petitioned to have them put into "Compulsory Liquidation" as the debt was more than £750.
http://www.bis.gov.uk/insolvency/companies/company-liquidation#5
Tweet was dated 13 Nov, and promise to pay was 3rd Oct; so they have exceeded standard 30 day payment terms.
(IANAL as always!)
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 14:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: talktalk 'accidentally' charged us for two accounts over 3 years...
would have been nice if we thought of it at the time... they paid up pretty pronto after that.
funny thing was, after the tweet with the solicitor's mention, every emailed reply had this at the top:
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
That firm is actually our company solicitor's, but I guess they needn't be when it comes to social media ;-)
Openreach... don't get me started. £330 for a hole in the wall:
http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/pricing/loadProductPriceDetails.do?data=ZdqG%2Fxv%2FjSuBEEITnogh5uNOEwQ2%2FKws5WBAVcIlcholMnGHsqdC0vzO163bJmh34D91D7M0q8u%2F%0AIlSgtIFAKw%3D%3D
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:19 GMT Steve Foster
In the spirit of the season
I'm going to be generous to TalkTalk (though I suspect I might regret it in terms of downvotes).
Bearing in mind that they have been formed by fairly aggressive acquisition (buying various former ISPs like Tiscali, Nildram et al), they have to have been exerting considerable effort to combine all these disparate operations, with concomitant knock-on effects (organisational change isn't easy-peasy!).
That there's a clear downward trend in their complain numbers suggests two possibilities: either they're getting their act together (as the integration efforts reach fruition), or they're bleeding customers heavily.
Personally, I wouldn't touch 'em with a hyper-extended bargepole, but I know some people who are very happy with them.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:52 GMT John Smith 19
Re: In the spirit of the season
"That there's a clear downward trend in their complain numbers suggests two possibilities: either they're getting their act together (as the integration efforts reach fruition), or they're bleeding customers heavily."
Or perhaps both
IOW They've realised rubbish service -> losing customers -> losing money.
Plausible. No. Possible. Yes.
That's about as close as you'll see me get to the "spirit of the season."
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 14:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In the spirit of the season
I know others have had problems with TT, but I've been with them 2 years now and not had a single issue. For me it's either TT or BT at my local exchange and the issues I've had with BT made me go with TT.
My exchange has only just gone 21CN but before that BT only offered ADSL max at twice the price of TTs 22meg service, which being a very lucky 400m from the exchange I get the full 22meg.
As Captain Jack said "one must always choose the lesser of two weevils"
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:21 GMT Longrod_von_Hugendong
Its a 2 way street,
i have been with many providers that people say are shit, blah blah blah - i have never had a problem with them at all. Maybe being a competent user helps :D Mind you i do hate offshore call centres as well - especially when they have made up western names, hello my name is Dave - fcuk of is it.
i think this explains it better - http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Orange sucks
My mum was on the free broadband with your mobile contract offer. When this was withdrawn she offered to pay for her broadband (moving house soon so didn't need the hassle of finding a new provider) on a monthly basis -- orange said okay, then disconnected her. They said the person who said she could carry on with a rolling monthly contract had left (you what?) and to continue her service she'd have to sign up for an 18 month contract.
A quick call to ofcom, a call back to orange and things were soon put right (although who knows for how long).
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:58 GMT Loyal Commenter
Re: could it just be that
With the exception that these figures are quoted per 1000 customers, so they now have fewer OFCOM complaints per customer. As noted above, it is probably a combination of them trying to get their act together, and the people most likely to complain having left.
Personally, I have had no problems with their customer service, and have been a customer for a number of years. y only gripe is that when I did have to complain about an ADSL fault, there was a 3-4 week wait before they could send an engineer out. Given that this was shorlty after all the flooding in the UK though, it is probably explained by a peak in the number of faults due to that.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:54 GMT Adam Trickett
Nildram was good until they became TalkTalk
I use to be a happy Nildram customer. Each take over degraded the service and reduced the cost (marginally). Eventually TalkTalk took them over and the standard was the worst, billing was no good and I switched to The Phone Coop. It took over 6 months, a complaint to Ofcom and an email to the CEO to get rid of them.
I'm glad they are getting better, but considering how terrible they were it should be impossible for them to get any worse!
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:58 GMT Chris Miller
TalkTalk Business (which I also have arrived at via Nildram) are excellent. On the odd occasion when I've had a problem, you can get straight through to a UK call centre staffed by capable people. Of course, they're not the cheapest option.
I continue to be unsurprised that people choose the cheapest service provider and then find that you can't expect Rolls-Royce service for a Lada price (and that applies to any service, not just Internet access).
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yes they are
TalkTalk are in fact three disparate companies, TalkTalk Telecom (that does residential), TalkTalk Business (that sells to business and home workers) and TalkTalk Technology (that actually run their network - http://www.talktalktechnology.com/). Technology and Business are half decent when it comes to speed and quality of support and services, it's the residential arm that cuts costs to the bone.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:06 GMT John Smith 19
Note that "industry average" bar and also that there are about 450 ISP's in the UK.
But none of the worst 3 can even manage even the average level.
While Vermin and Sky can
Bottom line. If you want service to improve.
a)Shift to VM or Sky b) Shift to one of the 450+ other ISP's.
They probably don't have offshore call centres and where your subscription may be proportionately more valuable. 1 user among 1million is not much, 1 in 10 000 is likely to receive a bit more attention. It's likely many of the smaller players are regional providers at best but so what? Maybe they don't cover Wales. Big deal if you plan to move to Wales, otherwise who cares. Only covers Derby? Perhaps you've got a bargain (if you live there). Maybe they will roll out further, and so on.
Are all of those other suppliers more expensive? Is it really all about the money?
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:18 GMT Tom Sparrow
Re: Note that "industry average" bar and also that there are about 450 ISP's in the UK.
From the Ofcom report:
"The ‘industry average’ refers to the average of providers included in the Ofcom research. Complaints about other smaller providers are not included in this average."
Statistically speaking of course, if only the worst three had more than average complaints out of 450 then they would have to be truly appalling.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:34 GMT Florence
Re: Note that "industry average" bar and also that there are about 450 ISP's in the UK.
Unfortunately the huge majority of those 450+ ISPs use BT's infrastructure.
If you want (and can get) a BT unbundled line you're left with one of the major players. It's a pity O2/BE don't appear in this study though.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 13:49 GMT b166er
+1 for Zen Internet, pretty much the cream of the crop.
I must add that Freeola have also been excellent and a little cheaper than Zen.
Also, get yourself a proper faceplate and a decent router. (I have found Draytek's to be excellent under most conditions). This alone can make a real difference to latency, throughput and reliability.
thinkbroadband.com has some good comparison material available too.
As someone else said, you REALLY DO get what you pay for.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 14:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Optional
I'm with talk talk for my broadband (believe me, they were not 1st, 2nd, 3rd or even 15th choice). My only options on the local exchange for my flat are Orange, Bulldog and a couple of "i've never heard of you" providers and at that only Orange and Bulldog (are this company even still alive?) offered ADSL2 at the exchange, all others were still 1.
I have to say that as it goes they are alright, i get 10mbs, not amazing but atleast it's stable. I'd say in a year it's gone down about 3 times for less than an hour each time. I can't grumble too much given the connection is completely unlimited. I can't speak for their customer service as i've never bothered to call them (with the outages being so short) but their actual service, in my case, has been acceptable.
It's amazing that i can't get a fibre connection in the centre of Nottingham *grumble*.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 20:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bulldog no longer Talktalk
Bulldog was sold on by Talktalk to global4, aka Home Telecom.
http://www.global4.co.uk/news.html
"On the 22 December 2011 Global 4 acquired the entire base of Bulldog, the renowned Broadband supplier in the UK. This takes its residential clients to over 10,000 for its new Home Telecom division in just six months."
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Thursday 20th December 2012 15:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Optional
Many of the rural areas are being done thanks to part public funding - for example Cornwall where the EU is kicking in 40-50%.
It's time rural areas got thought of - people who are on a crusty ADSL line and strugging to get a few megabits will benefit more than some urbanite in Nottingham.
I'm a rural dweller and I'm glad of it. 71Mbit down, 20Mbit up FTTC is working very well thank you.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 16:41 GMT Tim #3
Talktalk packet sniffing
Aren't Talktalk the ISP that introduced deep packet inspection of all their users' traffic without an opt out too? They sound such a nice company to deal with.
It wouldn't be impossible for them to use the DPI info in order to shape the traffic to Ofcom's website too, but hopefully they are too nice to do that...
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 17:09 GMT MegC
Orange :'(
After being with Orange for 6 months and actually being reduced to the point of phoning them every day for 2 months trying to get my problem fixed (Basically borked ADSL), I eventually decided enough was enough and told them I was terminating the contract as they weren't fulfilling their end.
I was told "You haven't rang us often enough for that to be true", I stated I'd rang everyday for 2 months and their answer was "The calls aren't on our system", I eventually got out of the contract 2 weeks later after I sent them a copy of my telephone bill showing them every call to them and how its not my fault their incompetent staff can't log a call. After that I went with Sky until I moved house and was then in a FTTC area; chose XILO for my ISP and haven't looked back since.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 17:56 GMT Fihart
BT Shameful Waste
Found a BT Infinity kit in the rubbish (Huawei Modem, BT Home Hub3 Router and Hard Disk TV Recorder Box). Irritated to realise that the router is locked down so hard that it is, so far, impossible to re-use with another ISP. More irritated to find that the TV Box has Freeview but that only works when connected to router with a valid account.
This contrasts with Sky whose first generation routers could be recycled to use with other ISPs and whose Sky TV boxes continue to provide Freeview even without a Sky account.
There is really no good reason for BT to lock down their gear unless they actually want it to end up in landfill. Shamefully wasteful.
Incidentally, the router -- which current ads seem to claim has especially good range is -- according to accounts, a very ordinary piece of kit and my tests didn't suggest any extra range.
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 00:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: BT Shameful Waste
None of it should end up in landfill because they'll take it back if you ring them up and ask them.
Why would they leave the kit open - it's for their service, if you stop paying your subscription why would you get to keep it for free and use it with another ISP? You can buy a router or freeview box yourself if you want one not tied to a particular service.
The ads for the router say that it swaps channels automatically to find the clearest frequency, I don't think they talk about range.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 18:29 GMT N2
Im not a Talk Talk salesman either...
People dam Talk Talk, but my experiences are that its actually quite good, just one example: I configured a router for a client who lived beyond the 5.5Km limit and once connected he asked me why he had better service than the BT line in the office less than 2Km from the exchange. To be fair I usually used a DG834 router but they worked well. So I'll probably get thumbs down but Id prefer them over BT.
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Tuesday 18th December 2012 22:26 GMT MrMister
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Ofcom have received more orange related calls recently because of oranges decision to withdraw free broadband for mobile customers.
I you are (were) on orange, and paying more than £30pcm they would gave you a basic broadband package for free. They decided to withdraw it mid-contract, and many people were quite rightly unhappy.
Orange set up a special department to deal with the complaints, but would flat out refuse to budge on anything.
However, if you rang them up and quoted an ofcom complaint reference number, they would instantly do a u-turn and re-instate your 'free' broadband, that you are paying for as part of your mobile contract.
There is a huge thread about it on moneysavingexpert.com and this is what has swayed the ofcom complaints figures recently.
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 08:43 GMT MR J
My Experience
I once had emails getting rejected from TT's servers. They were open to listening and searching for this fault from their end. The "recovery" options they have for passwords and account details is great. I have found that when they say "we will call you back" they actually mean it.
I can only directly compare them (who I deal with) against virgin media cable (who I deal with) and can tell you that as a "customer" TT tend to be a lot better. When you go through nearly 20 staff members (all second level tech) at VM before you find one who understands how a modem works then you begin to feel like your fighting a battle that cant be won.
What I have found is that TT will not give you kickbacks like VM... I received nearly 3 months free once on VM when trying to get things fixed, but when there is a problem with TT they just want you to wait it out. I guess the other problem is that when there is a line fault they are reluctant to call out the BT team to fix it, so perhaps because I have not had a "major" fault on the BT side is why my TT experience is good.
I have not dealt with the other providers (with the exception of the odd call to BT).
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 08:44 GMT Grubby
Q3 2012
The results published are for Q3 of 2012 which show that between May and August TalkTalk are no longer worst ISP, sounds good, what it doesn't say is that in August TalkTalk made the whole team who deal with complaints redundant because they were based in Warrington near Manchester earning about £21k per year, so that they could move them to a site in Stornoway (a Scottish island) because the agents there are willing to accept as little as £14k a year because there's very little work there due to the island being so remote, this move was heavily funded by the Scottish government, but the island so remote that it's actually very difficult to find people to do the jobs which meant people were turning up to interviews in their school uniforms.
The result of this means that complaints are no longer being handled by agents with an average tenure of 9 years, they're being done by 16 year olds who have worked at the company for a few months. Staff turnover is so high that the company are struggling to back fill so have come up with another genius plan, send complaints to India! Yes, the people who work on customer service (and generate the complaints) now deal with the complaints they created in the first place. But the staff have been 'trained', well, they were sent an update in the weekly comm's email and have a template to make sure they ask the right questions and say the right things, they even include statements to assure the customer they're 'doing the needful'. So it's all covered.
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Wednesday 19th December 2012 12:56 GMT Alan Brown
TT have a local complaints desk?
That's...... interesting.
If you get an indian helldesk and ask to speak to a manager, they claim that they're the people who handle all complaints aboud the call centre.
WRT Orange beating out TT, it's no great surprise. I had to help out a fellow staff member a couple of years back when she wanted to move away from Orange due to abysmal service which was preventing her from home working. Orange refused point blank to give her a MAC, then denied they'd done so, while still refusing to provide one. In the end she resorted to ceasing her line entirely and ordering a new one from BT.
TT's call centres are atrocious and I wouldn't talk to them without a recorder running, but their connections are fairly reliable and 99% of _technical_ problems I've had (and seen others report) are down to rotten cable plus BT openreach shtting people around (I have ongoing problems down to bad street cables which openreach techs by and large try to fix by moving things to the "least bad" pair, instead of actually fixing the fault properly.)
That's changing recently with their "geek squad" and TV rollouts (There are increasing numbers of complaints about both) and I fully expect to see BT Vision eclipsed by TT's Youview offerings shortly - the reason they haven't shown up yet is that the rollout happened after August.
On the billing/sales side, TT are rotten but no more so than any other large incompetent org. Just remember to keep that recorder running when speaking to any business. They're recording you after all.