In reply to a post by hk11:

Yes, I tend to change every year as the provider I am with at the time don't offer me a deal for extending my contract. The list goes right back to dial-up as only had fibre for Six months or so. I was happy with ADSL, bar maybe upload speeds. I don't get much better speed on 40/10 now than I did on Plusnet AdSl two years ago!

i could not be bothered with that, If I can get a deal then I will stay. If you are getting poor speed then you are either a fair distance away from the cabinet or there is a fault somewhere or your ISP is slowing things down somewhere. Most of the time I got around 36Mb/s down on FTTC, ADSL was 3 if I was lucky.

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

[
I really don't understand this. They apparently provided a very solid network to you for years. This seems childish. They offered a compelling product that someone used to make a quality retail product I would be all over it.

An FTTP install is hardly a massive hassle and can be rid of a pointless copper set up.
[/quote]


I am using FTTP, but an alt network, but if I changed to Openreach FTTP I would have to go through having it installed again. That is why I will stay as I am now as long as Zzoomm keeps going.

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I'm not a hater of TT, I'm just giving my personal experience in the 2 years of using their service. It is a genuine series of complaints that I have. The connection to show as Connected when no web pages are opening is something I have only experienced with TalkTalk!

Your exact words are below you accused all TT customers that say they haven't had a problem liars just because you have, you are wrong!

Anyone else who is a TalkTalk customer will tell you the same experience as myself! If anyone says they've never experienced this, they'd be lying!

I am sure some Talk Talk users have a good service, I know of one who does, they swear by Talk Talk, he gets laughed at in the group chat I go in They are only taking the pee.

In reply to a post by hk11:

I don't get much better speed on 40/10 now than I did on Plusnet ADSL two years ago!

Thats not strictly true is it? you are likely to be getting the full 40 Mbps at the router but if you persist in using legacy kit to test the speed via wifi then you're always likely to get poor results. Makes sense for you to have the slow 40/10 package in your situation as you are causing a bottle neck by the way you access the internet.

In reply to a post by dect:

Tell me honestly, do you think if you put that new line request in with another ISPs you would have got a different outcome?

I might have had a different outcome where a more reputable ISP might have asked for a follow up/feedback how the installation went ahead! As this is part of good customer service.

But that was not the case with my experience from TalkTalk. After the engineer finished off with his visit, there was absolutely no follow up from TalkTalk to ask me whether I was happy with the service of the Openreach engineer visit.

I believe with another ISP like Andrews & Arnold they'll follow up because I read reviews from other people using more reputable ISPs that they follow up to confirm that everything was fine.

Nevertheless, I didn't bother to further chase TalkTalk on this matter as the service did end up being reliable after all (except for the down time from TalkTalk end from time to time).

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I'm not a hater of TT, I'm just giving my personal experience in the 2 years of using their service. It is a genuine series of complaints that I have. The connection to show as Connected when no web pages are opening is something I have only experienced with TalkTalk!

Your exact words are below you accused all TT customers that say they haven't had a problem liars just because you have, you are wrong!

Anyone else who is a TalkTalk customer will tell you the same experience as myself! If anyone says they've never experienced this, they'd be lying!

I genuinely believe all TalkTalk customers at some point have experienced connection downtime even when the router was on.
I know this was not technical problem from my end or cabinet exchange/SNR, etc. Because I watched closely the router settings and at that time I was having 6dB and the connection in the router settings was showing as connected.

Those down times were on average 10-50 minutes without an internet connection and usually they were night time between 12am to 3am once every few weeks to a couple of months. The connection would magically return without the router being rebooted or the connection uptime resetting.

Now if you have a different sleep pattern where you go to sleep earlier than 12am during that time maybe you haven't yet experienced the TalkTalk downtime?

All devices would lose connection so it's not a technical fault with my Ethernet of the computer. The fact that all of these problems vanished after my switch to BT last year suggests that all these problems were related to the TalkTalk service.

Some customers may simply be happy because they don't view this as a problem. I'm an online chess player and I am rated 2300+ on Lichess, I take my ratings seriously. I hate to have my connection drop and rating to be lost especially when I'm winning. Luckily Lichess gives a 120 second recovery time to return back to your classical game and 30 seconds on Blitz/Bullet. That way I quickly login from my mobile phone as I have 750MB of data with RWG Mobile.

Other users who are not gamers like my dad will not care for a brief connection loss. For them the service may be viewed as fine/good. But for me that's not a good service.

Ok, if you don't believe me check this out! https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Service-Status-D... Just had a look Planned Maintenance
Planned website maintenance on 8th August 2023
5 hours ago

We'll be updating some of our websites on Tuesday 8th August 2023

Start time - 3:00 AM
End time - 7:00 AM

Huh, I'm not surprised to see this, kinda reflects what I have just written above ^^. It's very likely that during this time if you tried accessing any websites using TalkTalk you will experience brief outages!

But of-course if you were sleeping during this time you'll be left with an impression "what a great service TalkTalk is"!

These TalkTalk planned maintenance's are constant! It is like Windows Update! At least I can disable Windows Update on my Windows 10 system, but I can't stop TalkTalk from continuing their planned maintenance schedule. Now maybe, just maybe it doesn't affect absolutely everyone at the same time. But whenever my connection with TalkTalk went down I always looked at that website and happened to find that their maintenance schedule seemed to have coincided with my connection downtime.

Most providers will have some maintenance periods like this. A&A advertise similar overnight windows quite regularly.

TT advertising them in advance is a definite positive - anecdotally some providers simply don't bother and rely on them being quick and in the small hours to mitigate the disruption to customers.

Services and infrastructure need maintenance and upgrades. If you subscribe to a single-circuit service and expect it to run 24/7/365/years without any maintenance downtime then you're being both unrealistic and asking for an inherently insecure service.

Most leased line services will only guarantee 99.99% maximum (just under an hour of downtime per year) on a single circuit. For this you pay at least an order of magnitude more for the service.

To achieve more requires multiple circuits, multiple routers, precisely to enable such maintenance to take place. You pay even more

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

I might have had a different outcome where a more reputable ISP might have asked for a follow up/feedback how the installation went ahead! As this is part of good customer service.

But that was not the case with my experience from TalkTalk. After the engineer finished off with his visit, there was absolutely no follow up from TalkTalk to ask me whether I was happy with the service of the Openreach engineer visit.

I believe with another ISP like Andrews & Arnold they'll follow up because I read reviews from other people using more reputable ISPs that they follow up to confirm that everything was fine.

Nevertheless, I didn't bother to further chase TalkTalk on this matter as the service did end up being reliable after all (except for the down time from TalkTalk end from time to time).

Interesting you use the word reputable, I can remember a quote many many years ago where they said in the south of England, Ford cars broke down more than any other car but when you dug into the data it was because there was more Ford cars on the road than any other make of car, you see TT as not being reputable because you didn't get the outcome you wanted and say a call back could have resolved the issue I would say that is naive.

Edited by deleted (Mon 07-Aug-23 17:06:01)

We shall see next week when I get the 89/20 service.

In reply to a post by ionic:

Most providers will have some maintenance periods like this. A&A advertise similar overnight windows quite regularly.

TT advertising them in advance is a definite positive - anecdotally some providers simply don't bother and rely on them being quick and in the small hours to mitigate the disruption to customers.

Services and infrastructure need maintenance and upgrades. If you subscribe to a single-circuit service and expect it to run 24/7/365/years without any maintenance downtime then you're being both unrealistic and asking for an inherently insecure service.

Most leased line services will only guarantee 99.99% maximum (just under an hour of downtime per year) on a single circuit. For this you pay at least an order of magnitude more for the service.

To achieve more requires multiple circuits, multiple routers, precisely to enable such maintenance to take place. You pay even more

In the case of TalkTalk those maintenance nearly always result in brief outages. The 99.99% reliability does not apply to TalkTalk.
I have used TalkTalk for 2 years and I can compare it side by side with BT, Plusnet and Sky previously.

Assuming that there have been maintenance schedules for BT this past 13 months, I have not experienced a single connection outage!

In the case of TalkTalk the connection goes down even at times when there are no planned maintenance's and when you then google to see if TalkTalk is down it appears that there are complaints right at the same hour of time.

Of-course it is unrealistic of me to expect 100% connection uptime 24/7/365 days a year. But in the case of TalkTalk the service will be down 10 minutes minimum and on some rare occasions up to 2 hours! This is not an acceptable level of service. Even 10 minutes down time is not acceptable and I'll be frank, I have never experienced such long down time with any other previous ISP with the exception of area outage. When my whole area was affected a few years ago, 18 hours I was without internet but that's understandable and not fault of the ISP.

Under an hour of downtime per year would be great if that was the experience I had with TalkTalk! If I were to calculate and add up all the downtime with TalkTalk it would add to at least 5 hours of down time in a year with fragments of 10-50 minutes every few weeks. I'm not making this up.

I'm so satisfied with BT's FTTC service that despite Community Fibre (FTTP) being available here last 8 months (since 03/12/2022) I have not felt the urge to rush switching to Community Fibre yet!

Had I been with TalkTalk I would've long switched to Communty Fibre probably from day one when the service went live! But switching to FTTP doesn't feel like an emergency for me yet especially not after I had been upgraded to FTTC on October 2019 from previous EO Line.

If some people are happy with TalkTalk then good for them! But if I am a well wisher I wouldn't recommend this provider as I can't promise that you'll be happy!

What times are these outages happening? If things are going offline between 1am and 4am then I don't really care how frequently that happens. Obviously different if someone works nights or needs to work an on-call rotation.