Failed fibre installation talktalk woes

despite my better judgement i had talktalk fibre installed on friday, the sky adsl was slow and the talktalk fibre seemed a bargain...WRONG.,
kelley came and replaced the faceplate despite it being one of the newer styles with master socket..whatever..he went to the cabinet and we had 40m sync, no internet connection but aparently "they" had been contacted and the changeover to talktalk would be in a couple of hours ie by 17:00.. NOPE phoned during the evening and was subjected to the india experience with all sorts of worthless platitudes but "not to worry all will be well soon" 12:03 an e-mail from talk talk "your internet is now connected" was busy saturday..sunday...no internet another pointless phone call to india, wait another pointless phone call to india, several hours online chat on the talk talk site still no indication of the problem or its rectification date despite checking and identifing lights and jolly useful chat STILL NO SERVICE... ANYONE ANY IDEAS HOW I CAN GET SOMEONE AT TALK TO IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM AND GET IT FIXED PLEASE.?? WHAT A MISTAKE YOU MAKE....!!!!!
I THINK I WILL HAVE TO CANCEL AND GROVEL BACK TO SKY..

Edited by celad2001 (Sun 02-Nov-14 21:32:25)

well it has become silly....
we had the original Kelly installer castigated and his office sent someone else out to fix the problem..guess what he couldn't do anything..the wiring in the house is ok its all good up to the fibre cabinet but the original job has been flagged as complete so Kelly cannot open the job again.. he went away..more phone calls...more phone calls more phone calls... calls to customer retention...talk talk wanted to charge me £50 for a talk talk engineer to call out..after some difficult moments it will be free next week...we are already day 5 ....day 12 talk talk man arrives confirms everything at the premises are ok its a problem with the exchange but talk talk wont escalate the no service problem as there is "a stop on the account " as I have asked sky to take over.. bear in mind this is the 12 th day and I have lost the plot now... talk talk will not provide the service until I remove the block on the account... nah I wont remove the disconnection threat until they connect any soft of service...oh and they are going to charge me £298 for cancelling the service they have never connected..... help anyone....?????

As a consumer you have various rights but you are expected to allow a provider reasonable time to resolve faults before moving elsewhere

Sounds like needs openreach to fix a cabinet side issue and TalkTalk should be getting openreach onto that. Placing an order with Sky may not have helped as will confuse openreach systems.

Phone Sky to cancel or be prepared to pay the £298, you're the one making more problems else. Give TalkTalk time to fix things, they're great for most people including me!

I had TalkTalk, when it worked it was fine but as soon as we hit a problem with disconnects, it was absolutely impossible to speak to anyone. All we got when we rung was a clueless non tech reading from a script.

Not worth the pain, I now pay a bit more for my broadband, but any problems Im straight through to someone who knows what they are doing.

well how long is a reasonable time to wait for a new installation to be working 5days., 12 days ? and still no indication when its likely to be working.

pay the £298 yeah right, whats that for 12 days of no service at all ..how long do you wait before going elsewhere?? a month or 2...nah
talktalk are a load of chimps, no one is prepared to address the problem just read the script and tell me I haven't plugged it in correctly......

I should have known better than joining up given all the tales of appauling customer service that there are around... if you want the £298 and the initial cost I am claiming back from the credit card company.....see you in court talk talk .

what a way to treat new customers..what they do to existing customers I cannot imagine

see you in court talk talk

You'd better hope that TT don't take you to court as you'll be the loser. You simply didn't give them sufficient time to fix the problem so you had better be prepared to pay their costs.

Silly question I know, but if, as you said in your original post, you have 40Mbps sync, are you sure you are using the correct username/password? What router are you using?

its a new talktalk superouter.. the Kelley man that came back after a customer care call to us identified an installation problem and the talk talk engineer that called both said its ok house -cab but the problem is elsewhere.. the installation was closed as completed apparently and cannot be re-opened.!!!
I connected to the router and it reported a connected 40m sync.
my guess is that there is still a sky adsl connection active on the line as well as the talktalk fibre...

we were quoted a 20 minute downtime when the fibre was connected... !!! and
yes mlud there was at no time an internet connection provided by talk talk during the 3 week period.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

As a consumer you have various rights but you are expected to allow a provider reasonable time to resolve faults before moving elsewhere.

OK, hear you loud and clear on that one but what is deemed to be a reasonable time? For some, anything more than a couple of hours loss of service and they start pulling their hair out. But I suppose reasonably a changing of BB provider, for a like for a like service, should be completed by the end of the installation day.

BB service is now as much as an essential service as is a supply of water, gas and electricity services where those utilities fall over backwards to restore a supply. OK, following a storm. tempest or flood, you might may be off for an extended period of time but a routine job should be worked on continuously until the job is completed.

As an example, my electricity meter was recently "upgraded" and I was offline for 20 minutes. If there had been an unforeseen issue with that task, I wouldn't wait longer than the following day before seeking an alternative supply which might mean hooking in a generator as an alternative source of power.

So why do ISPs think that anything that takes longer than the planned outage period is not their responsibility to act in the best interests of the customer?

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

So why do ISPs think that anything that takes longer than the planned outage period is not their responsibility to act in the best interests of the customer?

Because ISP's have to contract out the work.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

So why do ISPs think that anything that takes longer than the planned outage period is not their responsibility to act in the best interests of the customer?

Because ISP's have to contract out the work.

So that makes it alright then? The job may be completed next day, next week or next year providing there is going to be a full moon on that date.

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

So that makes it alright then? The job may be completed next day, next week or next year providing there is going to be a full moon on that date.

I was going to say what an inane comment but thought better and decided to ask:- If you had a daily paper and the newsagent, dependent on the delivery from his supplier, failed to deliver, would you shoot the newsagent?

If I was a lawyer with a shelf of case books i would answer but its down to negotiation.

SLA to repair a voice fault is 4 days and that falls within the USO remit, broadband has no USO so longer is to be expected.

Based on what we have seen and from a cold outsider viewpoint I am tempted to agree.

Only way forward really is get proper legal advice about your contractual obligations

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

So that makes it alright then? The job may be completed next day, next week or next year providing there is going to be a full moon on that date.

I was going to say what an inane comment but thought better and decided to ask:- If you had a daily paper and the newsagent, dependent on the delivery from his supplier, failed to deliver, would you shoot the newsagent?

You must have seen a recent news item that a Bank was fined £2.5b because their customers were unable to access their bank accounts online for around a month. It turns out that the bank, through their parent company had contracted out the work to India. Now I don't suppose customers of that bank had a SLA to be able to use on line banking facilities but a month was deemed too long to fix a fault.

No shooting of messengers is necessary, but that fine should focus the minds of managers to have robust controls in place that if things go badly wrong then they can't endlessly allow a problem to fester. It seems that some ISPs can leverage out of BTOR a faster fault repair service and that must be down to the price paid by the consumer for the service.

As for the daily delivery of a newspaper where copy could not be delivered due to a supply failure, then it is/was common practice to delivery an alternative title.

A very fair response to a rather belligerent comment on my part. (Must stop posting after a glass or two.) However, the current situation is of the OP's own making..

Read my post you got that to come I'm still sorting mine after 3 weeks

Nobody can read your post!

BB service is now as much as an essential service as is a supply of water, gas and electricity services where those utilities fall over backwards to restore a supply.

I agree with Trolleybus on this. Government is urging us to save (taxpayers') money by accessing more and more on line, many if not most bank, file tax documents, pay bills, shop and even work online. Many like myself contact their doctors and arrange medications online.

Lost broadband and/or inability to contact support can cause huge problems and even an emergency, as I found to my cost when changing ISP last summer. Admittedly this huge swing to BB has happened very quickly in Parliamentary terms, but it's high time Government recognised BB as the new essential service.

How can it be an "essential" service when so many households, mainly the elderly, do not have it? In my view a service only becomes "essential" when there are zero alternatives.
To those of us brought up on the internet, we think of it as essential only because it is easier than the available alternatives. (Some "youngsters" would even consider mobile telephony as an "essential" service"!)

Edited by deleted (Sun 16-Nov-14 14:03:21)

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

How can it be an "essential" service when so many households, mainly the elderly, do not have it? In my view a service only becomes "essential" when there are zero alternatives.
To those of us brought up on the internet, we think of it as essential only because it is easier than the available alternatives. (Some "youngsters" would even consider mobile telephony as an "essential" service"!)

Let's put this another way; one's quality of life is easier with an internet connection. Yes, if you don't subscriber to an internet service, then their are communal facilities that can be used and a host of other ways to obtain the service you want but often at tremendous inconvenience.

There will never be 100% connectivity to meet your "essential" rule in much the same way that not everyone is connected to a main sewage system or for that matter can get a mobile signal. However the time must have arrived to have an obligation to fix an internet fault within a reasonable time frame. I define that as being 7 working days, would you disagree with that?

We're wandering off topic here........let's try an analogy to the original post:-

Your car is not performing well so you call in a garage to fix it. They take the car to their garage and remove the engine and strip it down. They then discover it needs a skilled expert to fix the fault and he is not available for a couple of days. You are Teed off with the delay and call another garage to get it fixed. The original garage cannot do anything because they cancelled the skilled expert as a result of the second garage assuming control of the repair. The other garage cannot do anything because the engine is out and in pieces.

Not strictly analogous, but close enough.

In reply to a post by Stevenage_Neil:

We're wandering off topic here........let's try an analogy to the original post:-

Your car is not performing well so you call in a garage to fix it. They take the car to their garage and remove the engine and strip it down. They then discover it needs a skilled expert to fix the fault and he is not available for a couple of days. You are Teed off with the delay and call another garage to get it fixed. The original garage cannot do anything because they cancelled the skilled expert as a result of the second garage assuming control of the repair. The other garage cannot do anything because the engine is out and in pieces.

Not strictly analogous, but close enough.

Fair point. I need to seek advice on this before I respond, if indeed I do!

In my opinion the O.P. could have saved himself a lot of grief by a simple message informing Talk Talk that unless his fault was repaired to his satisfaction within a reasonable time he wanted the service cancelled on a specified date in the future.
In this way all parties would have known what the situation was and the ensuing chaos might have been avoided.