TalkTalk Reviews

I'd originally signed up with Nildram about 10 years ago and through a series of three or four takeovers ended up being a TalkTalk customer.

I won't list all the varied problems I've had with TalkTalk in the last couple of years, just the ones since November.

In November my package was unilaterally "upgraded" and I abruptly lost service. TalkTalk at first told me it was a regional outage and to give it 24 hours. They then told me it was my router. I replaced my router with a spare. They then decided it was my line and BT would have to visit. Five days later, while still waiting for BT to visit I discovered that they had withdrawn my fixed IP address for which I had paid. I called tech support again and was told home users don't get fixed IP addresses. Nothing I could say would convince them I'd ever had a fixed IP address.

I gave up trying and registered with a Dynamic DNS service.

Last week two things happened: first I noticed my fixed IP address had been restored. No explanation, no notification and absolutely no apology or offer of a refund for the downtime when they'd taken it away. No explanation of why they thought it was a line problem or a router problem and were unable to diagnose what they'd broken.

Then I got a paper bill, the first in over 10 years because I've always been on direct debit. In bold type it informed me that "This bill costs you £1.90 each month. Switch to on-line billing and save over £22 a year." So I have to actually take steps to stop them charging me for a bill I never wanted and never had in the past. Not happy.

Then, last weekend, while doing the on-line grocery shop, up pops a screen telling me that "Your WorkSafe settings prevent access to [Waitrose]. This website is categorised as "Drugs, Tobacco and Alcohol" and has been blocked by your account holder."

I was pretty angry at anyone presuming to control which web sites I can access but I reckoned it must have something to do with the "upgrade" so I logged into MyAccount. When I went to check/change the settings I was told the service was unavailable.

They can do nothing right. The people you get to talk to either don't understand what you tell them or pretend not to. They will repeat the same useless and irrelevant claims over and over. Sound quality on the tech support lines is an issue too. It is a uniquely frustrating experience for the £25 a month they charge me.

In the last hour I got my MAC code and I've pulled the plug on them. I don't expect to regret the decision.

UPDATE: I switched to Andrews & Arnold, for the same money (not cheap @ £25/mo, but I didn't want cheap—I wanted excellent). I've been with them almost exactly two years now. What an unmitigated delight they have been! I am very happy, except I wish I'd made the switch years earlier.

Using Talk Talk as your internet service provider is the worst idea you will ever have, yes the prices are cheaper, because they are cutting costs every which way possible.

Most obviously, awful customer service- if you aren't speaking to a robot you're speaking to someone who can hardly speak the language and is reading a script that only ever ends in 'there's nothing we can do' or 'turn your router off, wait.. turn your router back on'.

Secondly, and most frustratingly, the connection you are paying for is bad, provoking use of customer service in the first place. The modem has low signal strength, offering patchy or non existent connection in some areas of the house and an awful bandwidth that makes simultaneous usage impossible.

Streaming is unreliable, sometimes OK (nothing special) but often dropping in and out. Online gaming is a total nightmare, impossible to retain a decent connection to a server (though when one is established and maintained, credit where credit is due, it does provide a perfectly normal ping/response time).

In conclusion, Talk Talk are the WORST internet service provider out there in my opinion and i have triple the internet problems my friends do because of it.

I was getting pretty fed up with broadband constantly dropping out and dreadful customer service. As my prepaid line rental and contract were due to expire I called TalkTalk to see if they would make me a really good offer not to leave. After much haggling they did, including all calls to UK landlines and mobiles, and fibre at 76Mb/s.

After my line rental and contract had expired I called again to see if they were as good as their word. No chance! I was told that phone calls would cost extra, and fibre was only available at 38Mb/s. I said that this was not what I had been promised, so the person I was speaking to said he would check and phone me back the next day.

No phone call was ever received, just an email congratulating me on having signed up to a new 18 month contract. I then spent two hours on the phone, including once being disconnected by an Indian call centre, before I got someone to accept that I had never agreed to a new contract and I wanted it cancelled immediately.

This was the last straw. I immediately took out a contract with another provider. As a result I received another email from TalkTalk saying that I owed nearly £400 in contract breakage fees.

If I detailed everything that happened over the next two months it would be too long for anyone to bother to read it, but sufficient to say that after many hours on the phone, sending emails and writing letters I eventually got TalkTalk to accept that I owed them nothing. Fortunately I'm retired. If I was still working I would never have had the time to sort this mess out.

My advise to anyone thinking of joining TalkTalk is not to be seduced by special offers. They will do anything to get you to sign up, and then make it as difficult as possible to leave. Also the standard of customer service at all levels is utterly abysmal.

My advice to anyone with TalkTalk who wants to leave is to download a phone recording app onto your mobile phone and use it for all calls to TalkTalk. They are remarkably reluctant to put anything in writing, and they don't seem to like it at all if you tell them that you're recording a call. Also, if in desperation you write to the head of complaints at the CEO's office don't think that you're talking to anyone important. There seem to be several people who use this title, and I suspect they're nowhere near the CEO's office.

Was very straightforward moving from BT to TT and pricing very competitive. Haven't noticed any significant difference in speed. Have had frequent problems with smtp servers - we suspect due to TT IP addresses making it onto spam blacklists. Forcing an ip address change by turning off modem for a while can fix it. Temporarily.

Absolute torture.

In twelve years the service has NOT improved, contrary to the lies fed to us via glossy adverts.

When the service went down for more than a day (its gone down several times, but who wants to call these
gimps?) I was forced to call TT.
The Indian woman tried to speak in an american accent, but she was still frightfully difficult to understand and she was STILL reading, parrot fashion from her screen.

After twenty five minutes on the phone, explaining that I'm an expert in this field for 30 years, that the DSL line is active but the internet service is down, she still told me to 'try another internet browser'.
A further 15 minute call was endured, with the same antiquated crap, but to no avail.

So disgustingly poor it beggars belief - the costs have slowly risen, the service dropped out and hasn't come back, but TT insist they have fixed it. However in their text they state if it isn't fixed, call us - the call may take 15 minutes!

I've already called them twice, from my mobile for over 30 minutes total. I'd rather cut my balls off with a rusty knife than call these imbeciles again.

Go somewhere else, ANYWHERE else - when the service dies..and it will, you'll wish you'd never heard of 'BalkBalk'.

Don't both sending Emails if you use older packages, like before Outlook Express 2007.

They have "moved on to better things" so for a month I have not been able to send Emails. Bloody annoying if you use your computer for work. No compensation at all!

My techie son solved the problem in the end by changing some settings. This help was steadfastly refused by TalkTalk.

Now in a pique of anger I am moving away the line in question (I have too of them)because why should you reward major unhelpfulness with a contract renewal.

Previously I said this (some time ago)so simply shows just how you can destroy goodwill by really awful Indian call centres:

"Just made the switch to TalkTalk from BT and can't believe just how much more I paid for BT (two lines about £85)for a much slower service. Transition to TalkTalk was silky smooth and the speed is well up plus I am saving about £30 a month too! One line has unlimted calls to mobiles (I have two mobile phones so wont use it much anyway but what the heck!) and one unlimited to landlines. I wasn't even getting near that sort of deal with BT and this deal is exactly what I want.
Also BT unlimited does NOT mean unlimited. The line use to slow down drastically after some (well quite a lot of)SKY downloads. The Indian call centre said I was downloading too much. Well of course after kicking up a bit (a huge amount of effort with BT) of a fuss BT in the UK (it got that far)said "It wont' happen again". Well it did so I have moved. Thank God!

The worst customer service I have ever experienced is with TalkTalk. I left them as I found a much cheaper provider. They sent a bill for a period after I left. When I called them they said I would have to pay or I would get a £10 charge for non payment. I req to speak to a manager who was just as useless. She said there was nothing she could do about it. I said I wasn't happy and she asked if there was anything else she could help me with. She never helped with anything in the first place!!!! Foreign call centres do my head in! Now I have to pay a bill for a service I have not used.

TalkTalk are great value(cashback, vouchers, etc) and the average consumer probably won't notice much difference in product performance between them and the other major ISPs(there was noticeable congestion, that didn't affect speeds, on my connection until about a week before I migrated out). On the other hand there are irritating problems with customer service.

The foreign call centres are polite and cope with basic requests OK, however it can become frustrating if you have connection issues and unfortunately many of the foreign CS staff have quite strong accents that are difficult to understand - so you end up having to ask staff to repeat what they've said over and over again, and wonder if they understood you. Of course there are alternatives like online chat and e-mail if you prefer.

The UK based support staff on the forums (known as OCEs) take about three days to respond to a question and the forum moderation is rather questionable - some forum members are promoted to moderators and you could be forgiven for thinking a number of them are on a huge ego trip.

My advice after using TalkTalk residential for six months is only sign up with an ISP if they have UK based support, it's far less stressful all round.

The irony of this service is it was completely run by Virgin Media from it's inception. Tesco literally did NOTHING. The lines were provisioned by Virgin, the service run by Virgin, the technical support... Virgin. Tesco have no idea how to run an ISP.

Well, when I say Virgin, Virgin Media actually subcontracted the work out to Fujitsu and IBM. It was just a re-branded Virgin ADSL service with slightly different prices.

In January 2015, the entire Tesco Broadband customer base was transfered to TalkTalk as part of the sale of the Blinkbox service.

Tesco Broadband is now re-branded TalkTalk... Haw Haw.

It's funny what you find when you peel back the layers on a branded service.

Their prices are reasonable, but that's about all the positive that I can say about them!

Their broadband speed is both poor - we normally stream at around 28mps and we're on their fastest fibre which should provide up to 76mps - their Customer Service staff make promises that are unrealistic and promise to return calls that are never kept to, whilst the Technical Team are often difficult to understand and patronising with their trained levels of empathy that are delivered in abundance!

I have been in touch with their Executive Office on two protracted occasions and they're pleasant enough, but nothing tangible ever happens and all they do is to hide behind T&Cs when asked for compensation! Recently, I have endured two of their own engineers and one from BT, who spent an inordinate amount of time faffing around in my house and achieved nothing!

The telephone service is often 'crackly', the broadband speed is nothing short of pathetic (and I live less than 70m from the street exchange), despite having been provided with a new Super Router and I have learned, to my cost, that when you pay more, you get more, because with TalkTalk, that's al you can do, sometimes, as the download speeds prohibit anything else from happening, they're simply that poor!

In my opinion, you should pay more, go with a more reliable Provider and steer very well clear of TalkTalk, as Dido Harding, their CEO, does nothing and everyone else is about as useful as a chocolate fire guard!!