TalkTalk Reviews

it takes a lot for me to write a negative review, but Talktalk has just made me so incandescent with rage I had to write something down. In short, about two weeks ago I checked that our phone number could receive their Fibre Large broadband offering, and, needing to make a couple of presales queries, I ended up ordering over the phone rather than online. Everything was crystal clear at the time, the pricing was fully explained, and it was explained further that it would happen in two stages, firstly with the provisioning of normal broadband which a few days later would be upgraded to get the 'boost' as they call it which takes it to fibre speed. today, the day after successful activation of the normal broadband service, I phoned them up to find out when the fire the large upgrade to the line capacity will occur, only to be told that there is no record of my having ordered Fibre Large, and that in fact it is not yet available on my number (in central London), although it is coming 'soon', which I was explained could be months away yet. I can only conclude that this was a piece of deliberate corporate dishonesty to acquire new broadband customers on the basis that once on board, they would stick around in the hope that the exchange upgrade to fibre would be within the next few weeks, or whatever. I will never do business with talktalk again - you have been warned.

They are not awful, but I have actually wanted to change providers. Their support is erratic and the service is a lot slower than they claim. But it's quite inexpensive so I suppose I can't expect the best service. It would be sufficient if not for the technical issues.

Was pushed to this ISP when it took over my previous supplier, Onetel. Perhaps it has suffered indigestion thereafter, with the subsequent addition of other companies, but their admin has never been impressive.
The ADSL line is fairly reliable, although I was on a service capped at 2 megs for some time.
With the increasing use of streaming, for YouTube, Films etc., 2 meg became unacceptable and I paid more for their standard "Essentials".
Currently I receive downloads at 6/6.5 megs, which is just acceptable, and better than some people get in this rural area.
The likelihood of upgrade to fibre looks to be remote at present, but remains the most feasible means of improvement.

I went live with TalkTalk on 19 February, coming up to 3 months ago. Switching from BT has saved me no less than 2/3, i.e. I was paying £150 a quarter before and now pay £17 a month.

I use 3 different sites to check upload speeds and today showed between 15.5 and 17 mbps. This is only marginally less good than BT was and more than adequate; it is 5 times what is needed to watch streaming HD.

I have had no service outages in the time and could not be happier with TalkTalk.

TalkTalk are quite simply the worst company I have ever had to deal with.

The first migration number expired over the Holiday season of 2012. They just cancelled Broadband on my account without any correspondence. After trying to complain and fix the problem I provided another migration number only to have a very slow connection. An Outreach engineer visit confirmed my line was capable of 4+meg but I was on a 512K fixed circuit at the exchange. BT Outreach told TalkTalk in the report to fix it with an order to BT Wholesale to change the circuit to ADSLMax.

3 months after ordering I am still on a fixed 512K circuit (a product TalkTalk don't even sell) and am unable to check with anyone at TalkTalk about the state of my account.

The call centres are in all out-sourced (India and South Africa are two I know of) and generally a complete waste of time.

Never use this company.

If anyone is interested in seeing how TalkTalk compare with another ISP (bethere.co.uk) for the exact same ADSL2+ broadband service on the same line then i made a comparison of speeds, pings and customer service before i switched to TalkTalk.


In short:

BeThere.co.uk
Download speed: 950 KB/s
Upload speed: 135 kB/s
Pings to gaming servers: 11ms
P2P speeds: Always full speed
Customer Service: Great


Talktalk
Download speed: 690 KB/s
Upload speed: 98 kB/s
Pings to gaming servers: 34ms
P2P speeds: Sometimes came to a complete stop at peak times due to throttling
Customer Service: Terrible (see link below for more info on that)

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/showthread.php/32261-The-difference-between-TalkTalk-and-BeThere-for-broadband

I can only echo Linda's comments really. In brief my early morning speeds of 2.5 - 2.9mb were plummetting to 0.2 - 0.3 during peak evening hours. It was obviously throttling/congestion, but they blamed everything from my router and filter to BT and my rural location. Anyway, I'm now enjoying my first evening with XILO and getting, as I expected, a full 3mb. The support staff were generally polite and seemingly willing, but obviously not allowed to tell the truth. I'm saving 70p a month too!

I knew it was slow with them but didn't understand how slow until I moved to Sky.
What I do understand is how much stress their billing department has given me, trying to charge me for refusing to pay an incorrect invoice! Not the first problem I've had with their billing dept either.

nearly a year now and the worse ever broadband provider i have ever seen. joined cause this was cheap but didnot know that this was the worse one.
internet speed promised 4 to 8 but for 0 to 1.5 and some time no internet atall.

customer support minus. ring to sort out problem but they insist to upgrade instead of sorting problem.

Strong Suggession pay some one couple pound more but stay away as first month is good and then the worse starts
.

After ignoring all the bad reviews that I have seen flying around the net I decided to take the chance and get Talk Talk Essentials installed and I’m very pleased that I did.
The installation was at Balcarres Street, Edinburgh, EH10 5JB.
I went for the base Essentials package which includes phone line rental, annual cost £114 = £9.50 per month, plus half price broadband for the first 9 months £6.50/2=£3.25. [total cost for the year £162.25].
The installation included free line re-connection and a package sent through the post containing the free funky ADSL2+ router.
Installation happened on the day they said it would and the service has been operating well since go-live.
Line speed seems good to me: download speed of 18mb/s and upload speed of 0.8mb/s.
This coupled with the free landline calls 7pm-7am Monday to Friday and free weekends calls. With a boast of free caller ID display the package was just what I was looking for.

Very pleased. DD :)