ISP TalkTalk Pauses Sale of FTTC Broadband Lines to New UK Customers
Internet provider TalkTalk has confirmed to ISPreview that they’re no longer selling Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) based broadband packages on Openreach’s network to new customers. But the ISP says that this is only a “pause” while they finish setting up their new platform.
The situation recently came to our attention after a number of people in FTTC-only areas (i.e. locations where full fibre FTTP isn’t available yet) found they couldn’t order a broadband package (ISPreview has verified the same with our testing). Such consumers were instead presented with a generic message to say that “all TalkTalk broadband plans use full fibre broadband [and this] isn’t available in your area, so we can’t offer a broadband plan today.”
In addition, one of our regular readers, and an existing TalkTalk subscriber of some ten years (credits to Joe), similarly reported that his planned house move into an FTTC-only area had also been hit by a similar message. Upon chasing this up with the provider’s support department, Joe was told that his only options were to “transfer the services to a friend or family member or cancel without penalty“.
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“If only they still covered FTTC areas with no possibility of Full Fibre, they wouldn’t have lost a customer of 10 years,” said Joe after deciding to take TalkTalk up on its penalty free cancellation offer and switch to a different provider. ISPreview has since found a couple of other reports on social media echoing a similar experience.
TalkTalk’s Generic Notice on FTTC Order Attempts
We can’t offer a broadband plan today.
All TalkTalk broadband plans use full fibre broadband. At the moment, our Full Fibre isn’t available in your area, so we can’t offer a broadband plan today.
Full fibre rollout is continuing across the UK, so it’s worth checking back — full fibre could be available near you in the future. If you’re already a TalkTalk customer, you can still renew or upgrade your plan anytime in My Account.
The move seems particularly unusual for a provider in TalkTalk’s position, where a mix of heavy debts and high levels of customer churn have put growing pressures on the underlying business. Earlier this month it was also reported that Vodafone / VodafoneThree had tabled a bid for the provider (here).
The ISP has since informed us that the FTTC situation is not permanent (they don’t say that in their above notice) and relates to their ongoing work to fully adopt Kraken’s new customer management platform. Kraken is designed to empower their customer care specialists to more quickly and effectively review customer account details and take actions that would previously have involved long and complicated processes.
The provider told ISPreview that they’re still working to finish setting up this new platform and migrating customers to it, which clearly can’t yet handle FTTC sales as these have now been “paused“. However, TalkTalk said that current customers (including when re-contracting and home movers) should have been “unaffected” by this, but they also acknowledged issuing new feedback to agents in order to ensure that similar requests are processed correctly going forward.
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Finally, the ISP noted how they are currently exploring potential options for future sales through Kraken to properties with an FTTC connection, although no timescale was offered for when such orders might be accepted again.
In fairness, it is expected that FTTC will be gradually withdrawn as FTTP coverage rises, but most would probably agree that it’s too early to put a stop sell on this in FTTC-only areas that still account for a sizeable number of UK premises. At present FTTP is available to around 25 million premises, which leaves over 5-6 million lines on copper services and many of those will be FTTC-only.
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 expect more and more ISPs will decide that dealing with copper customers is no longer worth the effort. I have no reason to suggest that TalkTalk are being disingenuous but on the other hand it’s not unknown for companies to be economic with the truth.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they have decided FTTC is not worth dealing with already due to the higher risk of faults, and more complex diagnostic hoops they’ll make FTTC customers go through compared to FTTP customers.
They did the same years ago when they stopped offering their IP stream service at an extra £15.32 a month
No sensible business would change an internal system before it could do the basics of accept a customer order.
Then again this is not a sensible business.
In the age of “agile” and “minimum viable product” it is absolutely possible that someone decided that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze given that most of their potential new customer base is within the Openreach or Cityfibre FTTP footprints.
They have never been a sensible business.
Not forgetting they deal with Freedom Fibre & I think others as well. If sufficient areas that aren’t covered by Openreach FTTP are covered by the altnets they deal with then what’s left may not be worth dealing with. It will most likely be the case that more & more ISPs decide to go FTTP only regardless of any Openreach stop sell policies leaving customers with copper only service with a much more restricted choice of ISP, maybe in the end BT Group brands only.
Wonder if it’s anything to do with the fact that it appears every ISP’s postcode checker currently isn’t working (tried BT, Olilo, Plusnet, Vodafone – none work)
This looks to be an Openreach related issue, but I’m trying to get some clarity. Not related to the above.
I tried Cityfibre’s availability checker just now. They did lay the fibre some years ago. Since that time their availability checker has always consistently told me simply that I lived on a private road – which unsurprisingly I already knew. No information about the implications (wayleaves etc.) and I have not had a response to my emails asking “so what do I do now”.
Today after all this time the message has changed to a plain “We’re not available at your address”. Definitely something has changed.
This smells a lot like they’ve not paid their Openreach bill again. When I worked their they would stop offering Qube appointments because they didn’t pay the bill and Qube wouldn’t attend sites, they has issues getting new kit sent for EFM circuits because Kentons bills weren’t paid and same applies for new provides done by Openreach.
Maybe somebody in operations has finally realised that their offshore ADSL & FTTC support team are absolutely, completely, utterly beyond-a-joke hopeless.
Forget the 1 customer of 10 years that they have lost. They have lost a 1 customer of 60 sites who stopped placing orders with them a year ago and will be moving all other services away from them before renewal. We are already at 80 sites but the other 20 are not with TTB after the support experience.
oh wait, that’s TTB. Is this article just about TT Consumer? Well if TTB is this bad, I dread to think what TT consumer is like these days.