Over the last few months, but especially within the last few weeks, we’ve seen an increase in calls from customers surprised to have found that their broadband has suddenly stopped working. Their modems appear to remain ‘in-synch’ with the exchange, but their username and password is rejected when they attempt to connect.

Following the normal procedures for ‘No Authentication’ faults, we quickly identified that all these customers’ assets were no longer owned by ourselves in BT’s systems. Hmm… Strange, we thought, since none of these customers had requested to migrate away or cease their service with us.

After delving deeper into each individual case we found a single common factor - that the customer had opted to move their line rental over to Carphone Warehouse (TalkTalk).

The plot thickens

It would appear, you see, that in areas where TalkTalk have an unbundled exchange, they can move your home phone AND your broadband over to their equipment (fully unbundled) without a MAC key or any authorisation from the customer. So, even if you sign up to only move your home phone service to TalkTalk, they may just swindle you out of your trusty broadband connection - forcing you to take their option.

This doesn’t appear to be isolated to their ‘free broadband‘ option either. Several of our customers who have contacted us had not signed up to the more expensive TalkTalk plan that includes broadband.