No talktalk is not a robbing cowboy outfit. It was, I think, incompetently set up in a penny pinching manner based on customer service costs and doesn't make money. Remember Charles Dunstone apologising at the start because tt received twice the interest from customers that it planned for? What did he expect for a stunningly cheap service? For that read budgeted for at the planning stage when I have every confidence skimping on cs was effectively part of the business plan. It's called greed.

For robbing I would suggest and no disrespect Mr Dunstone - Phone salesman with wedge out of his depth jumping at deceptively not so easy way of capitalising on BT's legal requirement to shed lines asap and then on to broadband. Ouch!

ps Shortly before Carphone Warehouse went public on The Stock Exchange CW announced that it was cutting staff training from two weeks to one. It boosts profits. The City of London likes profits being boosted.

*** I knew my faultless broadband was being supplied by virgin as my incredimail address was forwarding all my messages through virgin , set up for virgin and virgin had not given out a MAC code. ***

If you never got a MAC number from Virgin then there is no way that TalkTalk could ever have set up Broadband for you.

I have only just come across this forum,and having read through all the letters regarding Talk Talk felt it only right to speak of my experience with this company. I originally had a home phone with One Tel with whom I had no problems at all,then CPW took them over and TalkTalk was born,I applied for their Broadband package and was advised of going online at the beginning of April2006.The phone line went over first dead on the day they said it would,and a week later we went on line - no problems at all,Fsecure online protection was offered free of charge for the first 3 months,after that it was up to me whether to continue or install alternative security-I did, I installed Norton, my choice,at no time did TalkTalk try to influence what I did-and now after nearly a year I have no reason to have any any complaints about my package or customer services,which contrary to what other members have said,cost nothing to phone from your TalkTalk phone line. My point is that before April 2006 I didnt even know how to turn a computer on,All I did was follow the instructions given at all times. Thanks for reading this.

Talk Talk is the worst company i have ever had to deal with i have had all the problems you guys have told in this thread.
In the 7 months i was with Talk Talk i never recieved the broadband but they charged me the higher rate for the talk3 package.
I wrote and called hundreds of times one guy called MARCO MENTOR @ talk talk TOLD ME NOT TO PAY MY BILL AS I WAS NOT RECIEVING THE FULL PACKAGE I WAS PAYING FOR.
So i didnt pay and i then had the debt collectors sending letters etc etc

i sent them one last letter with my obvious infuriation anger and dis satisfaction to their managing director as they had promised me refunds and re evaluated bills.to hear a non surprising nothing back.

WARNING NEVER CHANGE TO TALK TALK

here is my comical letter i sent

Dear Sir, madam or brain dead lobotomised foul excuse for a human being

I am writing to you as regards of my account arrears and debt collection agency that you have arranged to collect our Owings. Due to my hundreds of phone calls , emails and attempts to resolve this matter in your absolutely useless premises (carphone warehouses across the midlands) this (applying in writing) seems to be my last and only way to communicate with you , which seems about right as all the services you provide either don’t actually arrive or are totally useless. I have even tried my luck by contacting watchdog and advising them of your services but it seems that about 500,000 other customers beat me to it as you seem to have been on there for the last 3 weeks running but hey at least you’re getting your free advertising.

I ordered my broadband in September 2006 and it stated my go live date was early October and welcome pack arrives in 7 days. Sounds very good.
I am now nearing the end of January 2007 and still have not received my welcome pack broadband or any other service from you, not even a letter to state a problem or apologie. I did however notice that you doubled our line rental which the package that we applied for (that includes free broadband) costs. I found this highly intolerable and was frankly discusted. I chose this package purely for the broadband as I don’t have any need to make international calls.
I emailed somebody at Talk Talk called Marko Mentor (you should be able to find it on your system somewhere as I know for a fact that you keep all details even who logs in and out of customers accounts) and he sent me a reply after about 2 weeks and stated that we should not pay for our package until we receive the full package which I totally agree with (would you pay for something you are not receiving, err no)
Would you believe it a couple of weeks later our phone line was cut off , may I just add that your company communication system between staff seems about as advanced and reliable as a courier pigeon on acid tabs.
My partner and I made several phone calls to your highly annoying automated call centre and spoke to a few people in different countries after spending hours on hold only to either be cut off or passed around and getting no where. We battled with two of your staff for about half an hour to ask them to ring us back as your company is providing the technical difficulties with our package not us, in the end they agreed to call us back – the feeling I got from this was the same feeling id expect to get if my garden started growing solid gold blocks of grass and all the moss on my tiled roof turned to diamonds. Do I sound a little vivid or possibly insane? I suggest you try calling your team with a problem if you get through within half an hour your doing well and if you can understand your employees broken English on the other end maybe your onto a winner before inevitably being cut off.
Anyway back to my sorry story we got our line connected again but were told it would get cut off within a week and we would have to phone up weekly to keep our line from being cut off so I called your ‘team’ and got connected again a week later and also enquired about our broadband we should have been receiving for about two months after going round probably every department in 5 countries and spending my Saturday night on hold instead of on tap, I was told by a lady that my broadband was being supplied by Talk Talk . Now I am not totally thick and I have more than a soggy cabbage between my ears unlike the bull ****ting staff you have on your end of the phone that are ‘trained professionals’ (about as professional as a electrician in a swimming pool hooking up the national grid) this lady obviously wanted me off the phone so she could carry on painting the pretty colours on her nails or finish wiping her ***.
At this point I had had enough as I knew my faultless broadband was being supplied by virgin as my incredimail address was forwarding all my messages through virgin , set up for virgin and virgin had not given out a MAC code.
Never the less I had no choice but to say goodbye and hang up the phone before it fused to my ear with the heat of 2 hours automated service and infuriating hold music.
Surprise surprise we got cut off again so I went to carphone warehouse (Tile Hill Coventry Saturday 13th Jan) the guy (Hans) passed me the phone and called the English head office and put me through (another very helpful member of staff)…… after an hour and a half I got through to a lady (Fezi Npuke) that finally sounded as if she could help me , I explained my story again (I know it off by heart now and actually Steven king has approached me to put it into one of his latest horrors) This lady told me that she would look into it with her manager because she could see how badly we had been treated and would try and send us a re – evaluated bill (which we had been promised 3 times before all within the time scale of this letter) and she would phone me or my partner on Monday15th, I then pointed out to her how could she phone one of us when you had cut our phone line off (everything went silent as the penny dropped) at this point your professional companies ability really shone out I heard a crack and realised it must have been the heavens beaming down on this lady for her quick professional thinking and ability to tackle problems as she said to me …. What shall I do then?
At this point I attempted to slit my wrists with the closest thing to hand which was one of your pink foam phone covers (another quality item from you)… realising this wasn’t going to work I suggested she could take our mobile and work numbers and we agreed she would phone one of us at 11.00am Monday 15th on my mobile or my partners work number which I supplied.
We have heard nothing
I suggest you take this letter seriously as I certainly am not joking about your absolute lack of professionalism and reply to this letter if you would like to resolve any queries with our bill as you do not seem to understand how to use the functions of a phone.

I would also appreciate it if you could send me a re-evaluated bill something more suitable to the costs we should have incurred like your staff promised us as the last bill you sent through the debt collection agency is totally inappropriate due to what we have had to do to actually get a decent service (by another company).
May I also suggest any profits you do make go on company training and not custard creams and **** hold music.



NEVER THE LESS I STILL RECIEVED NOTHING

*** Nti or whatever name this company goes by ***

NTI were only the underwriters for their mobile phone insurance. New Technology Insurance are based in Ireland.

They ditched them in favour of Norwich Union as of the beginning of February 2007.

Hi Christy

I am not sure about the 12 months thing, i have now (after 6 unsuccesful calls) transferred the joyful experience to my bank RBS (incidently Lovely!!) to do that task for me, I do not want to start a hate campaign about this company but boy do they take the biscuit!!

Chez

TALK TALK IS INDEED A BLOODY JOKE! I have registered for the Talk3 international plan and their says I would get the thing going only five weeks later whereas the stupid Indian woman told me when registering that it would be done in a matter of three weeks. This evening when I called to enquire about the status of my order (was of course an effect of the terrible customer reviews that I read on various sites) a guy named Sudhakar said it would take longer as there was a marker on my line which means I had a ADSL connection of another ISP which is NOT the case as I moved into this place merely 15 days back. They seem to be really shady creatures, I must say. I really donno what I need to do to expedite the process. I am deeply concerned about their Broadband quality. Wonder if that works satisfactorily.

Hi Cheeza 52343,
Thank you for your reply, a lot of Companies still take money out of your account, when the Direct Debit is closed down. Talk Talk, have taken a lot of money off you, and should pay the money back promptly they have also had your interest for 16 months. And when the year contract, was upon your Broadband, are they not supposed to, offer you another contact to continue the next 12 months, or are they allowed to just carry on, taking your taking money.

Sadly his contributions which were all too illuminating ceased back in November. I fear more pearls of wisdom may not be forthcoming.

Dear welovetalktalk

Sadly your comment about customer service or the ceo'soffice being the way forward is incorrect. Take it from me and I have notes. My concern is that you are so ill informed.

I note that your 'profile' provides no company contact or indeed any extra contact. Perhaps you would like to get authorisation to act as a conduit for your company. In this eventuality perhaps you would approach the forum's regulator as to the best way to publicise your details.

Many thanks

Fedora

my wife and i bought our first computer last may.we got it up and running then went to car phone wharehouse and applied for broad band,this was just before the rush to take up the offer of the much publisized "free" broadband. 2 months later we where connected but we hadden't a clue how to get it up and running, so i called back to the shop explaining my problem.the young lady said as i only live a short distance away she would call to my home in her lunch hour and sort it out.she turned up next day as promised, spent 30 min's sorting it out and it has been perfect ever since! two weeks ago talk talk wrote saying because b.t. where so slow at upgrading the lines talk talk has begun doing it for b.t.! i was told a time and date when i would not have access to phone or computer for 2 hours.after this had taken place my p.c. has been upgraded from 2.2 mps to5.8 ... i must be very lucky but i have nothing but praise for both carephone wharehouse and talk talk....

Hi Christy

I have just ended my contract with Onetel (another subsidery of talk talk)
i had no problem with the set up or with the actual product but I did have a problem when my bills suddenly included an extra £11 per month for a dial up??????
imagine my shock and horror as because I was already on a broadband connection i therefore did not need dial up.
Now here is the confusing part, I took out the agreement in Oct 2004 at my parents house and I signed my direct debit mandate and got on with my life, in June 05 I left my parents and moved into my own house ( without a computer ) and thought i would leave the broadband open for my parents and continue for it to leave my bank.
In Sept 05 my bills suddenly shot up to £29.99 a month and I thought perhaps my parents were having a good olde time on the tinternet and never queried the bill.
This week my partner asked why I was paying £29.99 a month for Internet as it seemed a bit strange and when I asked my parents if they were into illegal downloading they denied all knowledge. In fact I had been overcharged for 16months before I had actually realised what was going on.
my first call was to Onetel who diverted the call to a chicken shed in a foreign country and i was told that I should have cancelled my dial up at the time of the broadband connection and i was basically retarted as i had not noticed earlier ( the last part I did agree with but obviously didn't tell them ) at that point she confirmed she had cancelled the dial up and she would look into a refund of the amount as a good will gesture but it would only be 2 months as that is all they will contemplate.
I continued to look into the Bills and emails I had been sent It took me to my account and showed me all transactions since my first connection and low and behold! they had charged me correctly for 11 months and THEN started to charge me for dial up!
as you can imagine my next call was back to the chicken shed who informed me they were "in the process" of refunding my money of 5 months but would have to take a Credit card or Debit Card number and they would place into my account, I called my bank who not only cancelled the DD there and then but as I explained the story to them have now got involved and under the indemnity scheme can query payments taken from my account in the form of a DD, they also advised me NOT to provide them with a CC or DC number!

I hope this helps in your quest!

Chez

Security is a serious issue and is one that Talk Talk and a number of other ISPs fail in very badly.

Software security is also a serious issue and one that is even closer to me as a software designer and writier. Microsoft and others have fallen at the hands of these thieves and it is overlooked by many as being an 'insignificant' issue. When the software that I worked on for hours and weeks suddenly is placed on a web site that offers it for free without your consent and without being paid for - well it broke my heart and destroyed the funding source for the project.

I cannot PROVE who did it, but I have a very good idea.

This is the same with ISPs. Talk Talk is a BAD ISP. In most of the areas they do not own the infrastructure that allows them to operate, so they are parasites to BT who feed off their system. Pipex is a BAD ISP for much the same reason although they also have the added problem that they are also consummate liars, cheats and charlatans to boot.

Basically you have to work on the principal that if you don't own the infrastructure that you wish to sell your alleged services upon, then you are (by logic and definition) a parasite. There is no parasitic infestation that is not - in general - bad for the host.

In my opinion, ALL parasitic organisations should be exterminated. If you are not part of the solution, you must be part of the problem and so far Talk Talk, Pipex, Tiscali, Sky and others like them are definately not offering working solutions.

End of logic lesson for tonite!

Readers should now take a look at,
http:/forums.vunet/thread.jspa?messageid=750468&740468
This will update on security at talktalk.net.

On the subject of security it is worth noting that many writers of computer programmes, will allow you to
test them by downloading a trial copy. These trial copies are usually for a short period of time or are not fully
functional. To unlock/get them to function fully you have to buy them.
Fair enough you might think.
Well there are sites on the internet where the hackers have broken these keys and the programme can be
downloaded and unlocked and be fully functional. The lists of such programmes is endless, virtually any
programme you care to think of.
You can in effect fill your computer with programmes from these pirate sites and not pay a penny for it,
not even to join the site!!
Even the greatest names in security have had their progrommes hacked in this way!!

So....how secure do you think you are if your ISP is suspect?????