TalkTalk broadband customers continue to flee Broadband customers at TalkTalk continued to flee the operator during the first three months of this year, with 126,000 customers switching away from the provider. That was on the back of 250,000 broadband customers switching to other suppliers in the previous quarter, according to research from Kantar World Panel. Some 17 …
When will people link up that cheap = nasty
If something matters, research the subject a bit, then pay more than rock bottom for it and remember they are still making a profit from you, whatever they are charging.
If sausages cost 5p each, they are not going to be as good as ones costing 50p each.
If broadband cost 5.99 a month its not going to be as good as the ones going for £19.99 a month.
Its really not a hard concept.
Good broadband costs quite a bit. It doesn't come "free" bundled with phone and TV.
Apparently maintaining a few hundred metres of copper and long-depreciated switching equipment to provide shit quality voice calls also costs a hell of a lot, going by how much my line charge is.
However, this isn't true.
If I'm selling two very similar sausages, one I sell for 5p and one sell for 50p, but I buy the first for 2p and the second for 3p, I'm making 3p profit on each of the cheap sausages and 47p on the second.
The quality of the sausages might be identical. The manufacturing plant, type of meat used, way the baby sausages are grown into big sausages, and everything other than the packaging might all be the same.
Is my 'artisan hand cranked' £10 sausage better than the 5p one? Possibly... but, like wine, are you buying the bottle and the label, or are you buying the stuff inside?
Real world example: Go look at the price for fruit'n'veg in Aldi/Lidl, and then in Waitrose. Probably came from the same farm, same earth... one has nice packaging.
The point was that cheap = nasty, not that mugs will pay a lot more for something that's well above the standard it needs to be
Yes, things can be marketed up to far beyond their real value - take football players and gold plated digital cables as an examples
None of this make the original point wrong.
If you are happy paying 5p for sausages and 4.99 a month for internet with free phone calls and crap service and constant outages, then that's your choice.
I'm happy with reliable fibre broadband that isn't from TalkTalk and sausages that come from a proper farm shop.with mud and other farm stuff outside the door.
So they have the largest proportion in the industry of existing customers who want out at the earliest possible opportunity, and more of their new customers join because of low price/promotional offers than any other supplier? If (as I suspect as an ex-TalkTalk customer myself) their new customers don't include more than a handful of wiser, been-bitten, not-going-back-there-again ex-customers, then the implication is that they're just buying market share. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Ah well, many is the complaint that I've fielded from my Mum about how shit their service is. And how their call centre is awful, and how she keeps having to reboot the telly-box, because it forgets to talk to the router-box.
Oh, and she's had a call from someone with her details claiming to be from them - and only got suspicious when they tried to get her credit card number, rather than sticking it on the exisiting direct debit).
But despite all that, she's just signed a new quadruple play deal with them, to take their (admittedly insanely cheap) mobile tariff, and re-signed for another year of brroadband, phone and TV.
The phone is about £7 a month for 200MB data, infinite texts and 600 minutes.
But Oh Good God what processor have they shoved in that YouView box? Is it a 286? You press the EPG button, and it takes twenty seconds. Changing channel takes over a minute, and the bugger takes about 5 minutes to boot. Modern Sky+ boxes boot in 5 seconds, and channel changing is almost instant - although I admit the last time I used a Virgin box (3-4 years ago) it was pretty shit.
"the biz was successful in attracting more customers across its range of broadband, fixed landline and paid television for the quarter"
Some folks just rely on the "it couldn't happen again, not to me! Not to lovely dildo, we are all safe with this new 2p cheaper package
"Some folks just rely on the "it couldn't happen again, not to me! Not to lovely dildo, we are all safe with this new 2p cheaper package"
That, and also they are the people with very short memories or never watch/listen to the news. Or maybe they did hear about TalkTalk on the news and now the only thing they remember is "TalkTalk was on the telly, on the news, they must be good"
You can fool some of the people all the time.
I'm still getting upgrade offers from TT. Despite leaving them as a phone-only provider 12 years ago, after they couldn't upgrade the voice-only line to voice+broadband. Why? Because the TT computer system told the call-centre drones we were a BT voice user.
Doh! Doh and thrice Doh!
Originally signed up with Toucan in 2000, Toucan got swallowed by Tiscali, who then shoved me into Pipex, who were then bought out by Talk Talk. Toucan were ok, Tiscali bad, Pipex worse and by the time Talk Talk were finished with their transfer debacle, I had given up and jumped ship back to BT in 2012.
Infinity1 makes all of them look very pants indeed.
"In some cases it looks like it'll have to be burned to the ground and the ashes being blown away by the wind before they change."
Not sure if this is a UK thing, a generational thing or just part of the human condition, but most people really don't like to switch providers. Ever!. No matter if it's gas, water, 'leccy, banking or ISPs, people really don't like change. There's a mental blockage that fears the hassle it might cause.
Yes I was bumped from Tiscali to Pipex too. I'm now with Plusnet (BT). TalkTalk was hacked as we know. Recently my email address has been used on crapmail; sometimes, but not always, to some of my contacts. I do wonder if this is a leak via the TT hack as I think I'm pretty watertight here...
After about a year of arguments after leaving them, they finally gave in. So that alone would stop me advocating them, but then they bought Blinkbox converted it to TalkTalk TV and dropped support for the PS3.
They cited lack of popularity, but I think that many potential users were waiting for it to support HD before investing in it, for anything other than UV replay. I know I was.
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