Openreach Allegedly Threatens to Block New TalkTalk Broadband Customers
Network access provider Openreach (BT) has reportedly warned the heavily indebted UK broadband ISP TalkTalk that they could block them from putting new customers on to their network. The threat allegedly arose after the ISP missed several monthly payment deadlines to the network operator, its biggest supplier, due to cash flow issues.
Just to recap. The internet provider has had a rough few years and in September 2024 secured a crucial refinancing package worth c. £400m (here and here), which saved it from the immediate risk of a default on its debts (extended debt maturities to September 2027). But it’s still in a difficult position and recently suffered another round of redundancies (here), as well as the continued shrinking of its customer base from 3.6 to 3.2 million customers over the past year (here).
In addition, over the past couple of weeks, there have also been several newspaper reports about TalkTalk allegedly suffering from disputes over fees and bills with several of its suppliers, such as Sky (here) and Openreach (here). The companies involved have, thus far, declined to comment.
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According to a new report in the FT (paywall), Openreach now appears as if it could be holding the Sword of Damocles over TalkTalk’s head following those late payments. The late payments are said to have varied in size and amounted to a “small percentage” of the total amount due, estimated at about £60m per month.
As per the previous reports, these payments have now been settled, although the BT Group is clearly keen to avoid a repeat of this. The newspaper claims that Openreach has now “threatened to block TalkTalk from putting new customers on its broadband network,” which we assume would only be enacted if the same problem with late payments were to continue with future payments.
The vast majority of TalkTalk’s customers come from Openreach’s national broadband and phone network, which helps to underline the significance of the network operator’s position on this.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I have to admit, I do like seeing the demise of TalkTalk. I was a victim of TalkTalk customer data falling into the hands of scammers. Wasting the time of scammers every 2-3 weeks is something I, weirdly, look forward to.
I also like seeing their demise. I worked for them before being transferred to an outsourcer they use and was put on their “cyber attack” helpline where they tried scripting us to say silly things to try and absolve Talktalk of guilt and blame the customer for what happened. “It doesn’t matter what the scammer knows about you or your engineer visit, you should have been more careful”, or “no matter how high we build our wall (regarding the firewall), someone will always come along with a taller ladder”. Absolutely horrible.
Possibly controversial comment. This is exactly what happens if you outsource your customer service to the third world thinking you’re saving yourself money. People despise TalkTalk, not because of the quality of their internet. It’s solely because how bad their customer service is. It’s utterly abysmal. And now their nearly bankrupt as a result.
I don’t think this was the major cause, at that time most if not all ISPs and mobile operators had their customer support outsourced to cheap low quality labor countries. What happened most likely was endless money borrowing when money was relatively cheap.
It isn’t just their customer service, it’s that the whole company seems to have no idea what they are doing. They launched FTTP and if you want a voice service in a CityFibre area their website tells you that they can’t help you (seemingly it has no way to fall back to provisioning via Openreach, which shouldn’t even be necessary), yet they have a digital voice product and the pages for that specifically says that it’s for full fibre customers.
When you consider the type of customer that might be interested in TalkTalk, things like not having a phone service must be driving sales away, and the fact it’s been in this state for years and nobody in any leadership role seems to care is quite telling – it’s obviously not a difficult problem to solve, it’s just that nobody is bothered about solving it.
I know it’s spun off now, but TalkTalk Business were the same for the brief time I was with them – customer portal faults where services were missing and nobody at any level of the organisation able to get the problem in front of anybody to resolve. It’s like every member of staff had given up and was just punching a time clock until they found a better place to work or took a redundancy offer.
Agree to be fair, always like TalkTalks network, specially the LLU days but damn they are impossible to deal with and have avoided them for 10+ years now due to this.
As an ex Tulketh Mill (Preston) member of staff, I agree. We had customer service and billing, Tech 1, Tech 2, and Options (later renamed loyalty). Out of all those depts, only Options/Loyalty was kept in Preston, with customer service agents being given the option to retrain. Tech 1, and Tech 2 weren’t so lucky though as they were given the option to relocate abroad and if they didn’t take it, were offered a “severance package”, not redundancy. Loyalty was transferred to Careline while they were being merged into HGS where the place was run so badly it was unreal.
For example, HGS bought new computers, but they had foreign keyboard layouts despite being in the UK as they wanted their staff to all follow US English. It was awful being there at that time. Then there was the enforced hot desking to “shake things up”. When they discovered there were enough desks to go round and people liked sitting in the same place, they brought in a “hot desk rota” which dictated where each team sat on a daily basis. Oh, the telephony reporting was crazy, too. If you were stuck on a call which resulted in you going on lunch 5 minutes late, and still took your 30 minutes lunch break, you were then marked as being 10 minutes late!
Alt + 143 is the one positive thing I took from my time under their outsourcer. For those that don’t know, that is how you get a £ symbol.
Nothing controversial – as indian tech support is as poor as they come as well.
Yep. See some of my posts on the ispreview forums.
No wonder the bigger isps are switching to Cityfibre
What’s that got to do with the fact TalkTalk Group can’t afford to pay their bills?
Clueless, TalkTalk owing money to other companies doesn’t mean every ISP should switch to CityFibre. In fact, TalkTalk is already using CityFibre’s network and has reportedly had issues paying them as well.
Do CityFibre not require paying for their services?
Do they continue to serve customers who don’t pay their bills?
Why, because they don’t pay their suppliers…. dumb comment.
Because you think they aren’t fussed if their bills get paid or not?
If they can’t pay Openreach then what makes you think they can pay city fibre? I know who needs the cash more .
Why? Do Openreach or other providers not deserve to be paid for the service they provide? None of these companies are charities and if Talktalk doesn’t pay their bills on time, they deserve what they get.
They are moving for fear of Openreach expecting them to pay their bills in full and on time?
What source confirms CityFibre are tolerant of bad debtors?
Do CityFibre continue to provide services to customers who don’t pay?
How dare a company expect to be paid for their services, per the contract.
Er, I think Cityfibre will want their customers (i.e. the ISPs that use their network) to pay their bills much the same as Openreach does.
I don’t understand !! My simple view is. You pay your bills you get your expected service. I presume city fibre will be the same if their bills are not paid
I cannot wait to see the day TalkTalk fold, they are a right shower horrible company rotten to the core.
Talk Talk need Openreach, as most of their consumer buisness is with them!
£60m per month, that is staggering.
It’s only £18.75 per customer. Pretty much what I imagine to be standard wholesale rate.
I wouldn’t miss them. When I got my first flat we had talk talk. At the time they had an issue with it’s supplied router that would cause it to restart up to 20 times in 1 24hr period. This would cause the exchange to keep dropping my speed. Would end up at 0.5mbps download. It was widely known on their own forums and they constantly refused to replace the router with a newer model and instead kept sending open reach out to test the lines.
9 months in, I left them early as a local ISP had installed FTTP. Got a complete refund for the 9 months after reporting them and they had the cheek to try and charge me a leaving fee.
I was a talktalk customer, loyal and true. Then my talktalk TV stopped working. Tons of phone calls later, 2 engineer visits to the property, it still didn’t work. 9 months of hassle and it never worked so at the end of my contact I left.
Every phone call was scripted and started off with really simple things – reboot the TV box. Reboot your router. Goodness knows how many hours of staff time they paid for (and mine they wasted) as they couldn’t get an effective escalation. Just kept blaming the equipment in my house! Blaming. That seemed to be the entire ethos. They made me agree to pay for the engineer visits if they determined the fault was with equipment in the house. I didn’t readily agree to that, but it was the only way forwards. Never paid for the engineer visits as they confirmed no issues in the house.
Poor customer service.
Poor technical support.
Issues not resolved.
I feel for the staff that work for talktalk
been with them for 4 years plus. mo issues and 8 ms ping only 55mbs sync as fttc but alaways been happy with them.
From slamming customers, to being fined by the regulator, to data breaches, to absolutely poor customer service, incorrect billing, poor product rollout and personally
.. I’ve literally seen someone break down in tears because talk talk wouldn’t accept an account holder was dead, good riddance. You won’t be missed.
It will be interesting to see what happens if and when Talktalk folds.
Since they use a different way of provisioning compared to most providers (IPoE rather than PPPoE) it wouldn’t be a simple migration of users onto another network. Whoever the Supplier of Last Resort is will probably have to take over the Talktalk broadband termination infrastructure, at least in the medium term.
No-one has 3.2 million subscribers worth of spare BNG capacity lying around, or the bandwidth to get them to those BNGs then onto the wider Internet.
The ISPs that run their networks relatively lightly couldn’t handle an influx of 1-2% of that.
The ISP is too big to just disappear, would go through administration, etc.
Their main worry right now is the covenant on bonds where if they don’t have £20 million in cash at the end of the quarter the creditors apparently get the company.
Talk Talk For Anyone? ….. No Thanks!
There are some ridiculous posts from people wishing TalkTalk would go bust as if this would have no effect on employees and customers. Hint: TalkTalk employees have to eat as well.
Furthermore TalkTalk’s problems have a direct bearing on Openreach. When Openreach reportedly lost 828,000 broadband lines in its last financial year, 420,000 were from TalkTalk – so a significant part of Openreach’s business.
I used to work here and had access to the entire customer database. I’ve no idea where those customer figures are from. They were nowhere near 3 mill 5 years ago. No wonder their auditors quit. Charles should have sold it 5 years ago.
I worked for them til about 11 years ago and still have a working login for their supportal.