A month ago I moved to my new flat in Limehouse in which the internet is provided by Talk Talk. We have their (advertised) 24Mb service. From the beginning I felt the speed wasn't very fast but for normal web navigation it was bearable. It was when I had to send my first email with a 5MB attachment that I noticed something was definitely wrong. It timed out a few times and when it finally was sent it still took some 15 minutes or more. I decided to take their speed test to find out our speed was actually 1.5Mbps dowload and 0.02Mbps upload. Called them, endured the standard obvious questions and finally the guy told me there was an issue and he was going to fix it in 48 hours. Two days later, nothing, new call, obvious repetitive standard questions and finally a helpful guy who recommend us to connect our router directly to the test socket. That implied disassembling our BT wall socket but that night we saw 8Mbps download speeds and 0.24 Mbps upload speeds, the fastest we ever got!
A few days from then slow speeds again, for example, it was impossible to do a Skype video call and even sound calls were difficult. We called them, answered the same repetitive questions and this time they sent an engineer who might have charged us £50 if the issue was inside our flat! The guy came 2 days later, brought his own router and did tests for a hour. After which he concluded the issue was not at our place but probably on the local exchange. He also filed some sort of report so the issue would be fixed.
After a few more days without any improvements we called them. At every call they would always give us the same BS about checking our wireless connection or about trying connecting with the cable, etc, etc. This time the phone operator had the nerve to say he could fix anything! 5 min later he admitted he couldn't actually fix it, LOL! Then he said he would escalate it. Later we got a text message asking if it was fixed. Obviously it wasn't. In another phone call the guy asked me to change the Router Wireless Channel, I tried to explain him that wouldn't fix the issue and even so he insisted me to do it...
More or less at the same time I exposed our situation to @TalkTalkCare on twitter, they asked the standard boring questions and provided me a form. I filled and.... you can guess: nothing!
We finally got tired of this, my flatmate called them (yes, they tried to ask the scripted questions even though we have a long story with them) and asked to speak with a manager. The manager said our connection was "normal" even though or download speeds were varying between 2-3Mbps, our upload speeds between 0.02-0.15Mbps and since we had internet no reason to complain. He also said he could send another engineer for £130!!! My flatmate asked "will that guarantee the issue is fixed?" Answer: "no". Since we were not having the service we hired we asked to cancel it and get our money back. Unfortunately Talk Talk charges £140 for contract cancelations!!! Their solution? Subscribe their fibre optic service. In my book this is only comparable to extortion.
I've been speaking about speeds because those I can objectively measure on their website but that's not the whole story. Quite frequently the connection is down momentarily where I have lots of ping timeouts, I drop out from gchat and msn messenger and downloads/upload get dropped. It's quite sad that in this day and age Talk Talk provides such a bad service and is not willing to do anything about it. It seems I'm not the only one complaining according to this article from BBC.
If we ask me why Talk Talk is called Talk Talk, my answer has to be because they talk a lot and don't do anything.
PS: My flatmate just told me that today a so called Talk Talk "specialist" phoned her, said he had just fixed the issue and asked her to confirm if it was fixed. She answered she would need at least a week since the speed varies and he was offended by it. Later during the call she asked for a refund and he said we weren't paying for our broadband as in the invoice it only said phone line. That's brilliant, apparently we hired a phone line and the broadband comes as an offer, love you Talk Talk! Our speeds tonight, before a 5 min connection failure:
