Tick-tock, TalkTalk: Users face fourth day of titsup broadband TalkTalk customers are piling up complaints on the company's social network pages and forums after days of paralysed connections in the south east of England. A number of Reg readers got in touch to gripe about the telco's broadband service slowing down to a crawl on Friday night. Sadly, the problem remained in place all …
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Some of our customers may have experienced slow speeds over the weekend, because of a network error affecting parts of London and the South East.
Engineers are working to fix the problem and expect a full service to resume this afternoon. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Once our network engineers have finished, our usual slow service will be available to all our customers rather than just in the South East.
Been with them since the LineOne days before they became Tiscali became TalkTalk. Never had any serious problems and my line always runs at close to the maximum speed. Judging by the feedback on the internet about them, I'd say I'm in a minority of one.
I was unaware about service problems in Northern Ireland. I've not noticed anything different about my speed or experienced any site problems over the past few days, so it's not affecting all customers here.
I've been with TT since '08, and I'm just about to sign up for another year. They always give me a cheaper deal than the year before, and my 22Mb line has never given me any problems.
Until this weekend...
You are not alone, there's two of us! ;o)
P.S. Seems fine today, back to its usual nippy self.
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No, not the only one. I'm another who (after the initial setup hassle which turned out to be Pipex at fault, not Talktalk) has had very good service from Talktalk (far fewer problems than my neighbours have had with BT).
What I like most about them is that they don't treat their long-standing customers as cash cows to be milked: they are the only company I have been with for many years who have offered money off and bonuses for staying loyal - most depend on customer inertia and put prices up as a reward for loyalty.
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Having worked for an ISP in the early days of broadband, I know full well that underinvestment or even understaffing plays havoc with the service quality. If you haven't budgeted for out of hours working then stuff will never get fixed until the next working day.
When people look at the price and think "oooh, cheap broadband" they never think about things like infrastructure, staffing levels, redundancy, etc). Public perception is that broadband is broadband, it doesn't matter who you go with.
Companies should state uptime as well as maximum true speeds to give a clearer picture. Will never happen though.
Unfortunately the front line support with TalkTalk is poor quality. If your broadband stops working at 10pm you have to wait until the following day to lodge the complaint. Then go through someone who wants to RTFM before escalating to someone else. 7 days later and after a 4th level of escalation you get to deal with someone that understands how to fix things and it's back up and running in a jiffy.
The really despicable side to TalkTalk is the veiled threats about it being your fault and the £125 charge if it is. However if your broadband is working fine and then at the stroke of midnight it goes awol then it's a fair bet it's their network doing something wrong.
I now deal with my (frequent) broadband outages by using a Mifi unit on PAYG. £2 a day is not a big deal if you want to keep working. Use it at least once every six months to keep the sim active. TalkTalk's service level encourage mes to use it more often than I'd like.
Another mostly satisfied talk talk customer.
Had an unrelated problem caused by the heavy rains, crackling line and al the trimmings. Went through their system and it has improved. Automated initial testing and then the process with the scripted drone (be nice to them and they get you through it quicker.....). Time elapsed to get an engineer, about eight hours, time I actually spent on it, maybe 30 mins. I found that acceptable. The checks they asked for were sensible ones.
Got told engineer assigned and then it went quiet, guess I know why now if they were all-hands-to-the-deck. Before the weekend problem I had poor internets, while its going on things have been much more stable and speedy... go figure....
If you get a problem with your line, hope there is some (any) crackle on the line, they seem to always prioritise this higher than a pure broadband issue.
"If you get a problem with your line, hope there is some (any) crackle on the line, they seem to always prioritise this higher than a pure broadband issue."
That'll be due to BT making voice a higher priority than broadband. I used to work for a company doing helpdesk support for a reseller, if there was a broadband issue, it would sit for days, even after calling the Indian drones they employ, as soon as it was an issue with voice they were all over it.
Before the weekend, I saw a message from an American company I deal with, asking for certain information from anyone experiencing DNS errors. Gave a good procedure for reporting the address of the DNS server the computer on my desktop is using.
I'm glad I am not having problems, because the DNS Server my desktop uses is at 192.168.1.1
And that particular box gets its DNS from Google's DNS server system, rather than through the automated set-up system run by my ISP. But if I was having problems, the info this company was asking for wouldn't tel them anything of that.
It is not the first time I have wondered if people based on silicon topographical features are using the same internet as the rest of us.
...as myself and others have been advising, where broadband is concerned, since broadband was introduced. In the old days of dial-up, yeah, fine, people like Demon were excellent. Broadband relies on the network, so get it from someone who actually has a network, not someone who's piggy-backing on someone else's and flogging it cheap.
Being able to stream video and music without buffering and being able to play games with lag and jitter is more important than the little extra speed virgin gives. Besides, virgin throttle your connection speed by up to 75% if you use it at full speed for more than 15 minutes.
Give me a truly unlimited BT or Sky Fibre unlimited any day. Hell, i'll take one of these broken TalkTalk connections before I go back to buffering virgin!
Quote:
Being able to stream video and music without buffering and being able to play games with lag and jitter is more important than the little extra speed virgin gives. Hell, i'll take one of these broken TalkTalk connections before I go back to buffering virgin!
As a TalkTalk customer in the affected region, I am experiencing no noticeable problems or slowdowns over what I normally get. The most obvious being a stupid amount of buffering while streaming from the likes of YouTube. It gets to a point where it's quicker for me to download the vid and playback from computer then it is to wait for buffering. Yes, it actually downloads quicker then it streams, which is odd because its just the same except one plays AS it downloads. Other then that, no issues here!
Paris, because she has the same number of unsatisfied customers... and is also pretty cheap!
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