Just a quickie. I sell Talk Talk door to Door in the south-west an I encounter people who have problems with Talk Talk or people who want to stay with BT.

 Problems that you have with talk talk ranging from calling Indian call centres to connection problems often are due to an out of date package. Talk Talk no longer have overseas call centre's they're based in Manchester, now I know it's no easier to understand a Manc than it is to understand an Indian but the thought's there!!

Now there's two schools of thought here.

1) You hate the customer service - Fair doo's at the end of the day we all interact with people differently, I personally hate sorting things out over the phone at least with Talk Talk you can go to Carphone Warehouse and sort it all face to face try doing that with BT or ANYONE else for that matter. Or you could look at it and say, well they're all as bad as each other really so you may aswell go with the cheapest! And if you use this site frequently enough you'll know it's talk talk.

 2) You LOVE BT. Why? They charge insane amounts of money, whenever you call them you call india. The only reason that there are now other landline companies is because the government saw that because BT had a monopoly on the phonelines they were charging excessively. So they privatised the market and Ofcom have frozn BT's prices until 2010 so that new companies can enter the market and evreyone's cheaper than BT they just are and Talk Talk's cheaper than everyone else.

 Look at the end of the day it doesn't require a massive amount of brain capacity, just a little common sense and you'll see why my job is so easy.

Please leave any queries below I'm actually quite happy to answer them. Anyone that would like to make a more urgent point of contact should use my personal e-mail address, t.p.andrews AT hotmail.co.uk and use the Subject Talk Talk.

 Thanks for reading

I neither love BT or hate TT. My broadband is with BT my phone with TT. I would like to change broadband supplier on price but totally fear the change over process,which seems frought with problems.I need my internet connection every day.

The process of change is not smooth enough and TT's history of resolution is poor.Why would I risk it? Despite being an compulsive  bargain hunter this is an area for me where service is paramount.

Your general theme is that price is the winner and you accept that TT is rubbish at customer service.It's not a convincing story from where I sit.

I was nearly put off by the bad reviews, but always an optimist, I reasoned that satisfied customers rarely bothered to write in, so took a chance.  I can only speak as I find in saying that both my Landline and Broadband started on the date given, I sailed through the set-up without any problems, and able to use the Internet by two o'clock in the afternoon.  My brother who went onto TalkTalk a week before me had a problem with a faulty line, partly due to B.T., and found the people in the Indian and South African call centres difficult to understand, but accordnign to the previous article, call centres are now based in Manchester, so that shouldn't be a problem in the future.  Lastly, the Costs and Billing are so simply set out, very easy to follow, unlike B.T. whose Bills I could never decipher.

 

talktalk broadband brilliant value and only tiny irritant is it cuts out frequently but it kicks back in a moment or so and I've never lost anything. talktalk phone brilliant value and no buts. BUT I don't NEED either and have an immediate alternative if necessary. Having had experience of CS and lack of response from call me Charles' office I keep my fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong that is not totally straightforward. If I NEEDED BB I would go straight to Waitrose, where my heart is but not my wallet.

In response to backfoot I would like to say that I was not trying to convince anyone that TT is the best thing since sliced bread. My job is to obviously sell the product but I can only sell it at your door due to many constrictions, so why would I try and sell it online? Anyway the point I'm trying to get accross is that as a door knocker many people assume that they are doing you (the door knocker) a favour by signing up. This, in some respects is true as if I don't sell I go home out of pocket. However, my comission for selling is £12 for Talk2 and Talk3 with broadband and it is £20 for Talk3 without broadband. Now when you look at those figures in comparison as to how much you save even on the quarter then I ask who's doing who the favour? And in regard to your BT broadband and switching, you're one of the lucky ones. Seeing as TT rent the lines from BT you won't go 'offline' until the switchover date even if it's late to switch over.

I only wrote the above article because as someone wrote it is rare that a customer who is satisfied will write a review.

 Another comment I get frequently is, "If I'm happy then why should I switch?" It's a very good point but the statistics speak for themselves in that for every customer that joins BT a further 3 leave and out of those 3, 2 of them join TT.

I hope that this is a satisfactory response to your comment.

I'm glad that hamlet and ty4that are enjoying the service. I also thank you for posting 'good' reviews on the site. For alot of people trying to stick up for TT they seem to be fighting a losing battle because people who are satisfied just read and don't reply. Thank you for your comments.

 

It's this sort of thing that frightens me off.

see the thread:

TALK TALK - ANY CHANCE OF A REFUND? A SERVICE? A CHANGE?

Perhaps you would like to explain why TT feel the need to break UK law and mislead prospective customers in offering an "Up to 8M" service and then purposely tying them to a fixed 2M IPStream circuit.

Dai Young, there is nothing illegal about offering up to 8mb broadband. TT work through the phone lines not on cable so they cannot guarantee a speed for your broadband. Sky, BT, Virgin, all offer up to 8Mb Broadband on phone lines and the other offers are for cable customers only.

That is absolute rubbish and a typical reply from TT staff. Customers who are able to take advantage of higher speeds are being tied to fixed 2M IPStream circuits rather than ADSL MAX circuits. It's a backdoor method of bandwidth management that's dishonest, misleading and illegal.

This is a question to Hamlet and Try4that:

Is your service delivered via LLU or via a BT IPStream circuit? If it's via BT, have you run BTs official speed test to check IP profile against line stats and delivered speed etc?

If you're connected via an LLU circuit, what results do you get from the BBMax speed test? How do those results compare to your line stats? Again, if you're LLU'd, have the implications of moving back to Waitrose or any other IPStream/DataStream based provider been fully explained to you?

Whether connected via IPStream or LLU, are you fully aware of TTs FUP/AUP?

Hello DaiYoung. Just a quick response to your earlier comment and I say quick because I don't really want to give you the time taken to write this sentence, but out of generosity I will.

 Firstly I don't work FOR talktalk I'm an independent marketting agent and I take on contracts from firms. I started this string because I had to sit numerous exams to gain adequate product knowledge so that they would let me take out the contract so here I can pass on advice and not company policy numbnuts.

 As far as your broadband goes and with you getting all technical how about this. You have broadband capaciy on your phone line whatever it may be then that wont be your connection speed whoever you're with. With any broadband company you will have an upload speed and a download speed and the sum of these two will equal your broadband speed. TT has one of the highest upload speeds so that when you want to send e-mails with atachments you're not sitting there all day.

 Thanks for the typical treatment of door knockers in that I'm something from the bottom of your shoe.

I am a human being and I thank everyone in this thread apart from yourself for treating me that way. 

Obviously the exams you took weren't sufficient to provide you with the most basic of knowledge where the mechanics of basic UK broadband provision is concerned. You learned absolutely nothing about reading what's actually in front of you and even less about civility!

Thank god you won't be knocking my door!

Oooh handbags at dawn.

Just a thought it would help if one of the resident experts could cast some light on the underlying debate about broadband speeds. Especially for the hopelessly non techies amongst us (me included).I use BT and when I measured my line speed it was nowhere near the 8Mb/s.It seems adequate though for my needs.

When I checked it,it also seemed sensitive to the Mcafee anti virus/firewall i use.Is that true?

Also I would be interested to know if  our doorstep salesperson  feels that there is actually any benefit to customers from having this sort of tactic used to sell products like phones,electricity,gas.I personally find it intrusive,misreprentative and pushy.My mother was a victim of  a commission based salesperson and he totally and deliberately missold a product to a vulnerable elderly person.Why can't we be left alone to explore those products and markets that interest us as and when we want to?

There are two main product types in use where a connection via BT is used. These are fixed speed (Usually 2M now) and ADSL MAX (Up to 8M).TT are advertising an "up to 8M" product but placing customers on a fixed 2M circuit. This is simple to prove and senior TT staff have admitted this.

As for determining your connection rate it rather depends on the service that you're connected to. In the case of an ADSL MAX service, two sets of figures are required - The line stats from your router or modem (Gathering these data depends on which make model you have) and the results of the BT MAX speed tester at speedtester.bt.com where IP profile is the single most important figure. I've posted an example of the results of this test elsewhere on these forums.