This is EXACTLY the case I have been trying to make for nearly a year on this forum.
Talk Talk and AOL are both owned by Carphone Warehouse. So what they are trying to tell you is that their own companies do not talk to each other. OFCOM couldn't give a fig about anything and in the mean time innocent customers are being given the run-around.
I know people think I am some kind of BT advocate but they couldn't be further from the truth - I am merely a HIGHLY experienced and HIGHLY qualified IT professional who knows the minutia of complex communication systems. Whilst BT owns the cable infrastructure for 90% of the UK communications network, the de-regulation of the systems meant that you got a load of inexperienced and technically incompetent companies that then were able to call themselves Internet Service Providers. In fact, they are merely reselling bandwidth over which they have extremely limited control and knowledge. So OFCOM introduces the MAC concept to try and "smooth the way" for people to change from one rip-off to another. This is useless when it comes to changing from an LLU service back to a BT service as the MAC system is totally irrelevant. It is the same argument when moving from a cable service to a BT service - the MAC is meaningless. Therefore the who MAC concept is fundamentally flawed and useless in certain conditions.
The principal problem here is that the government QUANGOs and so-called 'experts' lack real experience and expertise and merely add to the confusion and idiocy of a poorly thought out deregulation process in the first place. People may not like it, but facts are facts. If you don't own the network from the outlet in the house to the outlet in the server space, then you introduce a weak link that can only ever be just that - weak and therefore a liability.
I hope that this explains the situation better for you all.
SHARK!
For every positive action, there's an equal and opposite government plan.