Moving to Talk Talk, should I?What's it like?

Hi Talk Talk BB users.

I have a friend who has signed on the dotted line for BB service provided by Talk Talk.
I nearly cried when he said he'd signed up as choosing an ISP is very important for your sanity and I had heard of loads of problems with the TT rollout. I tend to think the really cheapproviders are loss leaders, have poor customer service and can manipulate the service to make the headline speed sem attractive although the one you experience is muc worse.

As TT users can u advise on the following.

1.They have bought Talk 3 or option 3.
2.Is there a minimum contract term? Im off to look at the TT website and cancellation options.
3. Are you getting reallife speeds? 8mb?
4.Do they P2P.
5.Is the customer service any good?


I did suggest he went for bethere.co.uk, but his wife signed up for this.

Thanks for any advice.

Thankfully, I'm not a TT/CPW customer and never will be. However, I have a lot of contact with TT/CPW users. Some, mostly those who use their connections for little more than email (If and when it ever works), browsing and updates etc are happy but the majority regret their choice of provider.
To answer your questions directly:
I don't know about your first question but I'll as a few folk later.
The contract length is 12-18 months depending on package.
This forum is littered with complaints such as the subject of this thread. Although TT are advertising an "Up to" 8M product they are placing customers on fixed 1 and 2M circuits. It's very likely that legal action will be brought against TT/CPW in the very near future for their mis-selling of the product.
If traffic inspection/management/shaping isn't in place at the moment, it will be in the very near future. See the AOL (Now TT/CPW owned) section of these forums for more on that.
Customer service is little more than a bad joke. Officially, you will need to be connected via the equipment that TT want to sell you before you qualify. If and when you do comply to their rules regarding support, you'll find it's next to useless.

My service is not bad but the subscriber really needs technical knowledge to tweak his connection. Instead the service is being sold as "works out of the box" which it might do but probably won't successfully. The 18 month contract is the biggest bugbear. Hence I cannot actually recommend TT but if they improve their overseas 1st line CS I might one day.

I wouldn't cancel unless you have problems. Some people are delighted with their TT experience.

I managed to move away from TalkTalks appalling service. Unfortunately my mother is still with them.
Talktalk's service wasn't too bad well before the "broadband forever" marketing first reared it's ugly head. I'm sure many, including myself saw no reason to move at that time and happily signed up to the new contract.
Sadly the service hasn't improved and to be honest I wouldn't even know how to describe it now.
Cheap phone calls are appealing, but the broadband side is a hit and miss affair. My mothers BB was upgraded to LLU a few months ago. The line syncs well, but rarely does she ever get connected. Seeing her total usage is about 50MB a month! you would have thought she would be an ideal TT customer.
However although there are tweaks that users can do, such as changing MTU values etc, this isn't apparent to the average broadband user.
It's all very well TalkTalk saying we will upgrade your exchange on x date, but not following it up with say an updated custom driver CD at the very least is just appalling. Even an update in hardware more suited for their equipment would be preferable. However the customer is just left not knowing what's going on.
Personally i can't understand why Charles dunstone appears to be happy with his companies performance, because imo the word "quality" on any level just doesn't exist when it comes to the mechanism's TT uses.