Free Broadband Blog

Sounds alot to me and you but to be honest this is peanuts to Talk Talk and i reckon they will be pretty happy with a loss of only that amount.

So 620,000 people have signed up for Broadband with them out of these 200,000 are still waiting to be connected. Apart from these little hiccups and they are little in the scale of things Talk Talk seem to be doing pretty well.

Anyway read the educated version over at the beeb!

Yeah thats right folks, surprise of all surprises Talk Talk have crap customer service! Well just to save the lawyers getting in touch the official statistics from uswitch.com say that only 42% of Talk Talk broadband customers said they were happy with the service they recieved. To be honest though Orange were not much better on 46% and then NTL and Tiscali came in with 50%.

All this survey really does is confirm what i have heard so many times before that basically us brits got crapped on froma great height in general by our service providers and we simply get sucked in by the hype.

My money is still on Pipex, still no problems excellent service and download speeds, i definately can’t complain.

Oh yeah read the full article over at silicon.com and make your own interpretation of the results.

Ok i know this is pretty old now but it is likely to have a big impact on the broadband market in the UK. Basically AOL has about 2 million subscribers which seems an awful lot but thats what they claim. So apart from the fact there are 2 million people suffering from the AOL browser and all its computer stalling and slowing down that it can offer it basically means that TalkTalk have just bought themselves another 2 million customers give or take a few.

How can a company which has openly admitted not being to cope with the number of subscribers it has envisage coping with another 2 million. Things can only get worse surely.

And what about AOL?

Well to be honest i won’t really miss them but for some it was a nice, comfortable, easy and supposedly safe way to access the internet. There is no doubt that the majority of AOL users have been there for years and they kept using it because they understood the naff graphics and most of all it worked.

So basically i now think there is a gap in the market for or there soon will be a gap in the market for supposedly user friendly (ie i will take over your PC) standalone ISP/browser application which helps the less techie of us out there.

So RIP AOL but who knows where Carphone is going with this.

It seems that sense has finally prevailed at TalkTalk as it appears that customers with genuine complaint such as those citing broken promises, service interruptions, and delayed local loop unbundling are being allowed to leave TalkTalk if they ask.

Basically this is a turn around for the thousands of customers who have experienced problems or have continued to be simply with out a service since signing up for Free TalkTalk Broadband.

The full story can be seen over at The Register 

BBC Watchdog have just shown an article tonight on the continuing issues that have been occuring with Customers signing up for Free Broadband with TalkTalk. They mentioned the fact that Talk Talk had adverts banned earlier this year for making the promise of “Free Broadband forever” and then went on to meet a few disgruntled customers.

Nicky Campbell also went to TalkTalk HQ to discuss this with Charles Dunstone who i guess is the MD, he stated that “half a million have already signed up and the offer has been so successful, the company has been overwhelmed”.

Well no surpise there and what i guess he was trying to say was that basically tou would expect a few disgruntled customers out of 500,000 but i think to be honest it is few more than just a few in this case.

But joy of joys, he then states that he hopes that by Christmas you should be able to TalkTalk to a human instead of a computer. That should be nice.

Anyway to read the full report go to BBC Watchdog.

I think we shall wait and see………did you know pigs can fly?

The UK ISP TalkTalk is famous for it’s ‘Free broadband for ever’ product, but how good a service do they provide? Here’s a blog by a British student who’s had nothing but problems with them, and even though he’s no longer receiving their service continues to be billed.
Go to http://talktalkissues.blogspot.com/

Yes they supposedly offer a free broadband service. But yet again it’s not actually totally free because you have to sign up for one of there phone packages in order to get the free broadband.

So what’s the offer?

Well you have to sign up to one of there phone call packages first. The package in this case is called Talk3 and basically it comes in two forms. The first form costs £8.99 and includes free calls to UK landlines with a few exclusions and the obligatory £11.99 a month line rental. This option therefore costs £20.98 a month with the broadband thrown in for free.

The next option costs £9.99 a month (although there are some offers at the moment for £8.99 a month for the first 3 months) and this includes International Calls to 28 Countries.

Both the call options have limits of 70 minutes on calls after which you will be charged at the normal rate. So basically hang up on 69 minutes and redial and you won’t get charged.

So what about the broadband? Well, on the face of it, it is a very good offer. You get download speeds of up to 8Mb and you can download a total of 40GB a month. You also get a measly 15Mb of online storage and 5 email addresses whoopee doo. Now TalkTalk also recommend that you purchase there ADSL modem as well. This costs £29.99 and they say it is because your internet speed will be affected if using an older ADSL modem which doesn’t meet ADSL 2+. To be honest I am not sure about this but if you feel the need to buy a new modem I am sure you will be able to get a similar spec one at an online retailer for less than £29.99.

They do offer two internet security packages for which they charge a minimum of £2.49 a month extra so i would simply get a free virus checker like AVG and a firewall such as the one included with windows and this should stop everyone but the most determined hackers as long as you keep things up to date.

So what should I choose?

Up to you really the offer on the table is excellent on paper and for just an extra £1 a month you might as well get the free international calls, you never know when you might need to ring Australia.

So on paper everything is good, but in reality there have been a significant number of problems with the service to date. Horror stories of people not being connected for up to six months and waiting for hours in customer service queue’s on the phone. Things are not well at the TalkTalk ranch as they seem to have had too many people take up the offer. If you have had any issues please add your comments to the article below as it will help users.

Conclusions

At the moment I would hold off getting TalkTalk broadband if internet access is a priority in your life at the moment. The service is simply not that good but it is improving all the time by the sounds of things and if you want to take the risk then dive straight in.