Posted: 27th Jul, 2011 By: MarkJ
Internet and phone provider TalkTalk ( AOL UK ) has today revealed some interesting statistics about the total number of times that an telephone engineer has had to be sent out in order to fix a home broadband performance related fault. The ISP claims to have
carried out approximately 100,000 visits between October 2010 and June 2011.
TalkTalk's CEO, Dido Harding, explained:
"In the majority of cases where a customer is unhappy with the speed they’re receiving there’s a problem with the in-home set up. When that’s the case we certainly don’t wash our hands of it, it’s our job to make sure the customer has all the information and the means to maximize their speed and, if they can’t achieve this on their own, we don’t throw in the towel.
Between October 2010 and June this year we delivered over 100,000 engineer visits to the home to fix faults. We work on a ‘no win, no fee’ basis at a heavily discounted rate. This means that where the fault is in the customer’s home we charge £50 while if we find the fault is in the network then we fix it at no charge.
If you’re a TalkTalk Plus customer, we provide Speed Kits (which include an iPlate, new ADSL filter and supporting guide) free of charge."
It should be pointed out that the engineers themselves are actually managed by BTOpenreach, which operates the underlying BT telecoms infrastructure. BT usually does not charge for faults found within their own network (i.e. those outside of your home).UPDATE 2:28pmApparently TalkTalk really does have its own engineers and they're not BT ones as originally thought.
UPDATE 2:43pmThe 100,000 visits are by TalkTalk engineers who have gone out to fix faults in the home because the ISP thinks that their issue lies within the in-home set up. "
If this ends up not being the case and we find out it's an external fault then either one of our engineers will fix it at no cost (if it's on our network) or we’ll raise an SFI request if we think it's on BT’s infrastructure", clarified TalkTalk.
We know a few ISPs that might like such a service.