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Don't migrate to TalkTalk Business

This is a cautionary tale of why you should not migrate to TalkTalk Business broadband from a TalkTalk Consumer account.

So, a bit of background. We have been with TalkTalk since the days of Tiscali and USB ADSL modems, and although we were happy with TalkTalk's 'Plus' package with the 38mbps fibre, I felt that as our contract had finished we would be much better off going to their business side as by dropping the TV and 'free' mobile SIM we could upgrade to 76mbps fibre and a static IP for a small monthly saving. Seems too good to be true? That's because it was.

First impressions were great, I was greeted by a friendly chap called Ben on their UK sales desk who advised me that we could be migrated over with only a few hours downtime on the line. However, in order for them to take over our line we needed to remove the Fibre. I contacted TT consumer and they were more than happy to do this for me. Now, this was my first mistake. TT consumer then decided that this change in contract locked us into another 18 month cycle, which became an issue when the line actually migrated. More on this later. What I probably should have done was just get TTB to put in a new line for us (they are free) while the old line was working and then only cancel the old line once the new service was up and running. Anyway, on the 25th of February we had our fibre switch-off. After much fiddling with a number of ADSL routers, I couldn't get my service back up. After a call to TTC's Indonesian call centre (I think that's what the chap said after asking me to guess his location, he was really nice actually) they decided to send out a TT BrightSpark who came around that Friday, completed all the checks they had me do while I was on the phone and then decide that it was actually a line fault. At this stage our phone service was totally unaffected. He (after quite a while on hold while trying to get hold of the aforementioned call centre) booked us a BT openreach line engineer visit. I waited in on Monday evening, but no-one turned up, and there was no phone call from TT or BT. I called them again and they claimed that an engineer had never been booked, but they will book one for us. This engineer visit also failed to materialise. Finally on the Friday we actually got someone out who spent about 6 hours between our house and the exchange and he was unable to find the fault. By this stage we only had a week until TTB took over, and TTC had given up on us because we were 'in migration'. That was my second error. I should have waited until we had got a service back before I started the migration to TTB.

Anyway, on Friday the 13th (unlucky for us) we migrated over to TTB. Still no broadband. I called their tech support on the Saturday and they were really helpful and (surprisingly) still a UK call centre. They said they would get an engineer to look at the line from the exchange end during the week. By Tuesday nothing had happened so I called them again, and this time they said they would do a 'lift and shift' (whatever that is). Anyway, by Wednesday evening we had lost our phone line too, the dialling tone was replaced by a constant engaged tone. I called them again and they said that they would send an engineer out on Friday. And, this time, an engineer did arrive. He spent most of the afternoon with us and although he managed to restore the phone line, the broadband was less successful. I noticed that the modem did sync up at a pretty respectable 5mbps for a minute or so while he was working on it, then it went and then it came back at 0.3 mbps. He called me from the exchange to ask if it was working, and then as soon as I had said it was done, the connection died. I called him back and apparently that was due to a network test. I waited 5 minutes for it to come back but it didn't so I made another call to his mobile to be told the ticket had been signed off and he was on his way home. Great.

Another call to TTB and they agreed to send out some engineers to the exchange, but they wouldn't need to come into the house. On Tuesday we had a note saying that we had missed the engineer but he had managed to complete the tests and the line should work. Rather worryingly the note stated that we were on Sky broadband, which was totally wrong. On Wednesday this week we did have an engineer pop round just in case we were in and he did a few more diagnostic tests and apparently fixed an earth loop somewhere. Still no broadband however. Another call to TTB and they said that their team was still investigating and I should expect a call by midday today (Thursday). No such call, so I called them this evening to be told that they would be able to send out a Broadband Engineer (why couldn't they have done this sooner?) but if the fault was due to something in the house we would be charged £200. What? The modem that they provided us with or the BT iPlate that the last engineer replaced? At this stage we refused the charge and when posed by the possibility of us going into deadlock the chap on the phone seemed totally unphased.

We have now lost all hope of getting our line fixed, and this message is a last resort to get somebody to do something to get our connection going again.

Moral of the story? Don't migrate from a TT consumer fibre to a TT Business contract, just get them to install a new line.

Rant completed.
 
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I would not like to say what really went wrong for you but from what I was told the TTB systems don't seem to be able to cope with transfer from TT and things go manual with potential problems. I made the swap a year or so ago and was advised that it would be best to get a full cease of telephone and BB on the TT home account then start afresh with TBB. After some trouble getting the full cease, I ended up with a BT phone line for just over a week and no BB for the same period but it did all work smoothly. Sound like the advice I had was good. Subsequently I have been pleased with TTB.
 
He now has ADSL2+ LLU running at around the right speed for his area and it appears to have been down to a faulty line card.
 
As per les70, after my old ISP covertly transferred my line to TT (and buggered my ADSL connection up), I was told by my new ISP about the problem getting TT to transfer or migrate ANYTHING away from them, and was advised to get a new line fitted.
 
As Pete has said, we now are back up and running with a 5mbps ADSL line again.

A quick email using the address Bob suggested as well as to the 'talk to Greg' link on the TTB website soon got things moving. I had a call from their tech support team Friday morning and a BB engineer out Saturday morning. A couple of hours later and we are back online. By the looks of it we kept on getting line engineers instead of broadband engineers, so they were unable to fix the fault with the line card at the exchange, just confirm that the line was fine. The engineer on Saturday said that it didn't take him too long to find as he had fixed someone with a similar fault on the same card earlier in the week, which doesn't say much for TT's equipment in the exchange.

Ooh, and another email from the CEO's office this morning to say that we would be receiving three months free service to apologise for the disruption which can't be bad. Just got my static IP sorted so I'm happy now. Question is, do I risk moving back onto fibre... (apparently we couldn't have fibre until the copper was working properly) I haven't really noticed the difference that much in general browsing from using ADSL.

Certainly will have to keep that email in my address book in case I ever need it again though...

Cheers,
Rob
 
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As a business, you cannot afford any more down time; if you want to try fibre again I suggest getting and extra line installed, fibred up and running; before stopping the adsl service - or having it set up with the most basic (and cheapest) adsl option and kept as an emergency back-up.
 
Thankfully it is actually being used as my home connection, but I wanted the static IP to play around with websites and stuff in my home lab. I was expecting at least some kind of SLA considering it is marketed as business, but for the price you can't really complain. For an equivalent real business Ethernet over FTTP it's £150 per month, so for ~£40 (or £28 with just ADSL) it is a bit of a steal really.
 
We use 4G for our connection - I work from home. This is redundant in so far as - if one network goes down, I can swap ISPs in about one minute by changing the SIM card; we have access to three different networks (Vodafone, EE and Three). We use a VPN so we have the same external fixed IP regardless of which one we use.

Having access to separate infra' is key. If a strong wind blows the phone lines off the pole or the exchange runs out of electricity (this happens here in power cuts) then having two separate phone lines with two ISPs provides no redundancy at all. The ideal might be a mix of cable, DSL and 4G if you can get all three, and a router with automatic failover would be the icing on the proverbial cake.
 
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