TalkTalk outage: Dial M for Major cockup Hapless mobile operator TalkTalk's phone network has been hit by an outage, leaving customers without dial tones – and without service – on landlines. In a statement TalkTalk said: "We’re experiencing problems with no dial tones on some landlines. If you're affected by this, you may still be able to make or receive calls. "We …
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Ms Harding can make all the (legally suspect) claims she wants.
The reality is that if the company is materially in breach of contract and try to force you to stay, a small claims filing will make them run away very quickly.
They DO NOT want legal precedents being made. In general this means they settle "at the courtroom door" rather than face the possibility of a judge making a decision which goes against them.
And of course, the possiblity now exists for customers to start a class action, thanks to recent UK law changes.
Oddly they're still taking my money too. I'm working up a suitably irritated tirade to email to Harding as I can't be bothered dealing with their call centre after the hour it took them to tell me the wifi on my router was broken, which was what I told them the problem was at the start...
"Oddly they're still taking my money too. I'm working up a suitably irritated tirade to email to Harding"
Don't bother.
Small claims filings are fast, cheap and TT will get to pay all the costs. (taking money after the contract ends is fraud by deception and they don't want to be slapped with that charge)
You DO NOT have any legal compulsion to deal with their call centre or the ombudsman after leaving and all either will achieve is to waste your time and raise your blood pressure.
You SHOULD write a strongly worded complaint to your bank if TT manage to take anything more once the DD has been rescinded.
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I'm beginning to feel that we should be pressing Ofcomm to mandate monthly contracts for broadband/landline/mobile. Its the only way to keep some suppliers honest and competitive.
Bribing you for a lock-in should say it all. Sadly some people believe the advertising and I find it is unscrupulous suppliers who tend to trumpet 'caveat emptor'. Frankly none of us have the time and resources to check out the competence and arithmetic behind every contract we click on.
Meanwhile what happened to Dido's pearl handed revolver?
Are you sure? I was thinking that as a result of the recent hackhack, TalkTalk talked and talked amongst themselves and concluded the best defence against that happening again in future was to disconnect absolutely everything - including their customers - so that they can neither be hacked nor socially engineered.
I've never had a dialtone with TalkTalk. From the day I joined and (presumably) BT messed up connecting the PSTN side of things (internet was fine though), I've never had the use of my phone.
I tried many times to get TalkTalk to resolve this, but after months of being redirected to different departments, and automated text messages not working correctly, I gave up.
It was more grief to get it sorted than living with the problem, and that's how I'd sum up TalkTalk in general.
It depends. If you're a Talktalk customer out in the sticks you'll be on a BT wholesale phone service and BT wholesale DSL. In busier places, they have their own equipment in the exchange.
Some ex-Tiscali customers will have a BT phone line but a Tiscali DSLAM for Internet.
But the majority of Talktalk customers are on a Talktalk MSAN, which means that both the internet and the dial tone are provided from the same Talktalk-owned device. In that case, BT only provide the copper line, or "Metallic Path Facility" in the technical jargon (I kid you not)
I've never had a dialtone with TalkTalk.
I'm surprised. I've always assumed TalkTalk had offshored dialtones to the cheapest, rubbishest part of the subcontinent, just like the rest to their flea-bitten business. When you pick up the phone what's supposed to happen is that some Indian beggar in a particularly scummy call centre is supposed to make a "bbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" sound with their lips until you start to dial.
My guess is that the operational planners have messed up, and they have run out of call centre staff to do the "bbbrrrrrrrrrrr" bit. And you can't fix this quickly - did you know that the dialtone training takes six weeks before they're allowed to do live dialtones for paying customers?
Pah, offshoring, it never delivers the goods.
I'm surprised. I've always assumed TalkTalk had offshored dialtones to the cheapest,
You sir, should be punished. I am now trying to get out of my head the mental image of a gigantic barn callcenter somewhere North East of Timbuktu full of drones whistling dialtones for a living.
The real problem is - that image may not be far from the truth. After all, their CEO was pictured on the Beeb replying questions out of their "innovation center" with a VHS and Windows 95 behind her.
I have a client with talktalk, was working, then one day no ppp on the adsl, but the sync was there, and the phone worked.
When I checked it, phone came out on someone else's number, lines had been swapped by a BTo engineer (although I suspect MJQ or kellys).
Talktalk couldn't understand why we thought having someone else's line connected to the building and no internet was an issue, as "the phone works".
Some people did not choose TalkTalk as their ISP; instead, their original ISP was bought out and conditions enforced that made it harder to leave.
Personally, although I hate the though of paying money to these shysters, I would actually pay up, just to get rid of them. Of course, it's easy for me to say that; but sometimes, it's the lesser evil.
"their original ISP was bought out and conditions enforced that made it harder to leave"
Any transfer of contract would automatically entitle you to leave. They cannot enforce new conditions, you need to accept the new conditions, although that can be the default position by a lack of leaving.
Some are bought out, and some sell out their customers without warning.
I am looking at YOU Vispa; you stole my phone line and number, and cocked it up so I had no working internet for 6 weeks, then you had the GALL to charge me a termination fee AND cut my phone off early!!
...or a signalling network failure. The C7 message from the network trying to pass a call to talktalk is either being ignored or getting an unexpected response. Depending on which network it is callers will get number unobtainable or 'sorry, there is a fault'.
Those messages can take multiple routes so a total failure suggests the machine giving the response rather than the links to it.
Wait for the renewals to come up and people will just walk. DH will probably walk with a pay off well before that. Alternatively...
But I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
Many thanks to Dido Armstrong for the lyrics.
No thanks to Dido Harding for the phone service
My BT infinity service is grossly affected since last night. Many ongoing service issues reported on their status page.
Latency is fine, but bandwidth is grossly affected. Probably a congestion issue (at a wild guess). It does make me wonder if they have shifted traffic over from the fault reported on Mon.?
After OFF Hook and delivery of initial connection details to GCHQ the GOTO 4, Dial Tone, failed because DERF hacked TalkTalk and substituted some code at 4 that backdoors all your kit whilst filtering out your heavy swearing. Either that or TalkTalk have been sued for copyright by The MRSA, or whatever it is, for a hookey copy of the Dial Tone.... or they are just shit.
Surely not another "Sophisticated Attack™" could be the cause of this outage?
Maybe they forgot to pay their electricity bill and don't have backup power.
If the BNP can forget to pay the electoral commission for their membership fee, it's not completly beyong the realm of possibilities that BalkBalk are also complete retards.
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