TalkTalk FTTC

People rarely visit a forum like this to sing an ISP's praises for great service but often do to slate them when things go wrong so here is my experience for those that may be thinking of switching ISP's.

I have been with TT for more than 15 years in that time i have rarely had to contact them but when i have i have used online chat which has always got the problem sorted quickly, phone support used to be a nightmare but it has improved over the years (i still prefer chat) and there is also social media for those that use it.

Our speeds have always been good as the test below shows so if you are considering moving ISP dont assume all TT customers are having a nightmare as some haters would have you believe all ISP's have unhappy customers!

It's been great for me as well the 10+ years I've been with them. It's been quite dull compared to other ISPs I've been with as the service just works and I've had nothing to scream and shout about! 😀

I think all ISPs have their good and their bad points, but if you are lucky enough to have a good connection that is the main thing.

Things only start to go wrong when people get involved, that also includes folk who write bad software for the ISP websites and billing of course.

In reply to a post by Fenris:

It's been great for me as well the 10+ years I've been with them. It's been quite dull compared to other ISPs I've been with as the service just works and I've had nothing to scream and shout about! 😀

Thanks for adding your positive feedback.

Been with talk talk for 4 years now. Been absolute fine for those years. Use my own openreach fttc modem with my own router and wireless mesh and it’s been a pleasure. Never really had any issues and when I have they get it sorted when I report it via forums or self checker. Hope they survive there financial issues. Just recommitted to 2 more years at a decent price. Hopefully fttp comes here soon.

I have now moved to FTTP which only took one hour.

If anyone is thinking of switching please read this -
https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/talktalk/f/4767649...

For me, IPv6 is a requirement for an internet connection, so I wouldn't consider TalkTalk. It wouldn't bother most people of course.

Also if anyone is thinking of switching to Talk Talk you could take note of over 84,000 reviews here - Talk Talk Reviews

In reply to a post by Nervous:

Also if anyone is thinking of switching to Talk Talk you could take note of over 84,000 reviews here - Talk Talk Reviews

You could also check out the ISP unhappiness thread put it on from all time and see how few complaints about TT are in that forum compared to other well known ISP's-
https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/unhappiness.html

Edited by Jack_Hackett (Tue 07-Jan-25 19:39:16)

That may be because most of the TalkTalk complainers are not registered with these ThinkBroadband forums. Even complaining here isn't much of any use because those complaints don't reach the large masses of the population.

I remember having problems with the TalkTalk router every 30 days it will disconnect by design. What would happen is that the router was resetting by design every 30th day. For me at least that meant I had to be alert and make sure I am not in the middle of something important like an online chess game or other game that's associated with stats.

It's no surprise that I recently saw an article on ISPReview https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/12/broadb...
Maybe my experience is not totally related to this issue. However, it's worth pointing that apart from this issue there were countless of other issues where the connection will go down even when the service was connected! Somewhere around 9 months into my 24 month contract I started experiencing this.

Randomly every 10 days or a couple of weeks usually at night time. No web pages will load. I then checked the TalkTalk website, entered my postcode and it will say no issues. However, coincidentally they happen to have had a planned maintenance relating to their website. Not sure if this was a coincidence but this did often match with the connection going down.

Surely this could not have been at exchange level. I switched to BT FTTC in July 2022 and have been a BT customer for 2 years and 6 months and I have never experienced a single occasion where the connection would be lost even when it would show as connected.

However, I'll admit first few months I experienced connection drop-out every 14 days. The BT Smart Hub 2 was also causing me issues with it being programmed to reset every 14 days. But over time this issue disappeared and now I no longer have this issue as I am connected for 172 days now with no dropouts.

This issue never got resolved for me with TalkTalk. Now I do not know if I did use my own router as opposed to the TalkTalk router whether my experience would've been any better.

On top of that during the 24 month contract TalkTalk were silently increasing my mid-contract price. After 2 years it jumped to £40 per month from what originally started as £21.75 per month and it slowly kept creeping up with no emails or any warnings. Only checking the bills made me aware of this silent price hike. For me this was completely dishonest of TalkTalk.

Not to mention that when I originally signed up to their service the online support chat claimed that new telephone line will be included as I wanted the master socket moved to a more convenient location and I wanted a shorter copper line in my flat. Anyway, the Openreach engineer did come but refused to do that and instead simply installed an NTE5C Master Faceplate socket.

I could've simply bought this separately for £10 online and install it myself. I could've also signed up and get an £85 amazon voucher with Uswitch with an 18 month contract instead. I missed that opportunity and chose to sign up via TalkTalk online chat representative. This was a big mistake that I deeply regret. After this bad experience I don't think I'll reconsider TalkTalk again for the foreseeable future.

However, my experience with BT FTTC has been excellent! If I were to leave BT that will simply be because Community Fibre is available here and joining FTTP would be the only reason for me to leave BT. Otherwise BT as a service is miles superior to TalkTalk, it even has Digital Voice included and IPv6.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

That may be because most of the TalkTalk complainers are not registered with these ThinkBroadband forums. Even complaining here isn't much of any use because those complaints don't reach the large masses of the population.

In that case lets look at the figures below TT & BT 10 complaints per 100,000 customers

Well all i can say is i have been with TT 15+ years i have had little down time in all those years and confidently moved from FTTC to FTTP last month and i couldn't be happier -


HERE ARE THE FULL BROADBAND FIGURES FROM OFCOM

Two ISP's have less complaints, two draw and four have more

SKY • 5 complaints per 100,000

PLUSNET • 6 complaints per 100,000

TALKTALK • 10 complaints per 100,000

BT • 10 complaints per 100,000

VODAFONE • 12 complaints per 100,000

EE • 14 complaints per 100,000

VIRGIN MEDIA • 15 complaints per 100,000

NOW • 18 complaints per 100,000

The UK's broadband has been put under the spotlight once again by telecoms regulator Ofcom and there are some big winners and losers. Throughout the year, all major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are given the once over for how many complaints they receive and although the latest stats show a downward trend, there are still some doing far better than others.

Coming bottom of the pile in the latest Ofcom figures is Sky-owned NOW with the firm posting a result of 18 complaints per 100,000. That figure is quite a shock as Sky's own broadband service actually came out on top with the ISP scoring just 5 complaints per 100,000.



It's unclear why there is such a big difference between Sky and (Sky's) NOW but Ofcom said most of the moans had come from users annoyed by how their complaints were handled.

Along with NOW, Virgin Media also performed worst compared to its rivals with the popular supplier seeing 15 complaints per 100,000.

As we mentioned before, Sky scored the fewest moans followed by Plusnet (6 complaints per 100,000), then TalkTalk (10 complaints per 100,000) and BT (10 complaints per 100,000).

https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/worst-uk-broadband-com...

Edited by Jack_Hackett (Tue 07-Jan-25 21:03:04)

The problem with these figures is that the complaints per 100,000 don't tell us if those are related to the actual customer service, reliability, speed, latency, billing process, price hikes, etc.

Complaints are varied. In my case my complaints happen to be a combination of price hike, bad reliability of the service with TalkTalk. As for customer service, I can't comment too badly on that as when I complained on their forum they were very quick to respond and even sent me a router replacement, but it didn't resolve the connection drop outs!

For example, I was a Sky customer for 4 years on ADSL. Some of my worst experience of drop outs was in 2017 where I had 20 drop outs in 2 hours! I know that seems shocking. I still have the history log of this connection in twitter private message to Sky Help Team and they never responded. The problem here was of-course with my Exchange Only Line. So, it wouldn't be reasonable to blame this on Sky as my ADSL service was faulty. But nevertheless their customer service wasn't responsive because they couldn't find a problem with my line. And they also price hiked me to £32.74 for an abysmal service. Back then for whatever reason, we didn't switch ISP and did overpay our service for nothing.

Many years ago there was an ISP called Be Unlimited, which is now defunct as of 2013. At that time in 2009 it was supposed to be one of the best gaming broadband ISPs with the lowest of latency and I chose it based on reviews. But it came with a nasty router THOMSON TG585 v7, which meant that port forwarding was impossible! I could not connect to Games for Windows Live at that time. I could login, but I could not join various servers in Shadowrun, Gears of War, Fable 3, Halo 2, etc.

I needed to buy my own Netgear router DGN2000 to be able to open the necessary GFWL ports to play those games online. At that time it resolved the problem straightaway but I had to spend money on a new router. As you can see based on this experience review scores can be quite deceiving.

I also had Plusnet before I joined TalkTalk but that was with ADSL before the FTTC service came live in Oct 2019. Plusnet ADSL router was also pretty bad. The smallest of any kind, it was like the size of a calculator. Towards the end of my 12 month contract the router became faulty and was restarting on its own. It seemed to have developed a fault as this wasn't entirely blamed on my internet connection dropping out but the router system up time could not be maintained.

I didn't bother to ask Plusnet for a replacement as I knew I was going to switch to FTTC soon. And that's when I chose TalkTalk as my first FTTC provider. It was fine at the beginning and still better than ADSL as even having a drop every 30 days was tolerable compared to the terrible drop outs I was having on ADSL.

Based on my honest experience last 5 years having had both TalkTalk and BT I can genuinely say that my experience has been the best with BT. I regularly login to the router stats for the sake of comparison to see if my connection uptime has been maintained. With TalkTalk I can't tell what would be my best connection uptime as it historically never allowed a connection uptime of more than 30 days in just over 2 years being a customer! But with BT my connection network uptime as been for over 170 days so far. That is the biggest difference I see here. Along with no connection issues night time. 12am to 5am with TalkTalk my connection was down for around 10-20 minutes every 2-3 weeks even with the router being connected. This has never been my experience with BT thus far.

I have been so happy with BT that despite Community Fibre FTTP becoming available here I still did not rush to switch yet! And I am paying only £20pm for Home Essentials 2, without any price hikes last 2.6 years.

So, you can see those figures don't tell us anything. I would love to read more comprehensive user experiences from other people. But it seems experiences vary from user to user based on location, type of connection ADSL, FTTC, FTTP and the nature of their complaint.

Why are you spending so much time promoting Talk Talk Jack???

Talk Talk Reviews

Edited by Nervous (Wed 08-Jan-25 12:46:35)

In reply to a post by Nervous:

Why are you spending so much time promoting Talk Talk Jack???

Why is a post about a move from FTTC to FTTP promoting?

"So much time"
It really didn't take much time but even if it had don't concern yourself i am sure you have better things to be doing

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

The problem with these figures is that the complaints per 100,000 don't tell us if those are related to the actual customer service, reliability, speed, latency, billing process, price hikes, etc.

Furthermore, these aren't just moans. They are cases when the problem has not been sorted by the provider to the customer's satisfaction, and has ended up at OFCOM.

For example, Sky has a historically low rate. This might mean that the service is good and that they are good at fixing problems. But it could also be that they are happy to release unhappy customers from their contracts, or offer them compensation to settle the dispute.

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

The problem with these figures is that the complaints per 100,000 don't tell us if those are related to the actual customer service, reliability, speed, latency, billing process, price hikes, etc.

That's as far as i got.

As i said I have been with TT 15+ years and have had great service you have told us you have used both and prefer BT well good for you, time to move along i think

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

Why is a post about a move from FTTC to FTTP promoting?

Just an observation from me not a criticism, whenever I see posts from you I always know they will be about Talk Talk, I see you as a cheer boy for Talk Talk but thats not a bad thing as there are very few others doing the same so you help give a balance rather than all the negative stuff from others.

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

Why is a post about a move from FTTC to FTTP promoting?

Just an observation from me not a criticism, whenever I see posts from you I always know they will be about Talk Talk, I see you as a cheer boy for Talk Talk but thats not a bad thing as there are very few others doing the same so you help give a balance rather than all the negative stuff from others.

The problems with forums like this (and most forums) is people cannot wait to register then slate their ISP when things go wrong but rarely register to tell others what a great experience thy have had and for how many years, as we have already an ISP Unhappiness forum can i request an ISP happiness forum.

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

can i request an ISP happiness forum.

That would be perfect for you🤣

Post deleted by seb

Post deleted by seb

Post deleted by seb

Showing your real colours fella and thanks for the abuse via private message as well, If it makes you feel good crack on.

Edited by PCJM40 (Thu 09-Jan-25 13:42:13)

Please mind your language

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

The problem with these figures is that the complaints per 100,000 don't tell us if those are related to the actual customer service, reliability, speed, latency, billing process, price hikes, etc.

Furthermore, these aren't just moans. They are cases when the problem has not been sorted by the provider to the customer's satisfaction, and has ended up at OFCOM.

For example, Sky has a historically low rate. This might mean that the service is good and that they are good at fixing problems. But it could also be that they are happy to release unhappy customers from their contracts, or offer them compensation to settle the dispute.

Perhaps you are right. Also, it could be because they have customer service based in the UK.

Their router is also of better quality. I noticed that Now Broadband have a router with only 2 Ethernet ports! That is also a major minus point that can affect their ratings. Even though people can use a network switch but it is something that most people would not want to have to deal with.

Also TalkTalk have a customer base in India and also in South Africa if I am not mistaken. Many people have complained that when they contact customer service the people in Indian call centres are not able to resolve their disputes or are not aware of outages that have happened in their area in the UK.

This can be a big problem when you have to deal with customer service overseas especially with people who don't speak English clearly. Sometimes it is not easy to recognise Indian accents and that can also be annoying when you are on the phone. I've seen these rant videos on youtube regarding TalkTalk. Some customers have had difficulty cancelling their service as they kept getting billed even though they are no longer with TalkTalk.

However, it is important to mention that there are problems that some users experience particularly in ADSL Exchange Only Lines where regardless of what ISP they choose on the Openreach network, these problems cannot be resolved!

I was on EO Line until Oct 2019 and my connection drop outs could never be fully resolved. I was an ADSL customer with Tiscali, Sky, Be Unlimited and Plusnet and before that back in the early 2000 had Dial-Up, which had even worse drop-outs every 2 hours.

No engineer could help me solve those problems at that time. Yes, Sky were quite prompt to send their Sky engineer in our flat to have a look at our line. I remember the engineer said he could not find any line fault in our property.

The only way that solved the problem partially was to raise the noise margin profile from 3dB to 9dB and only then the drop outs stopped! But this meant that the speed was slightly reduced from 16Mbps to 12Mbps. But even then some mornings I would see the noise margin drop from 9dB to below 3dB and the connection speed dropped drastically as a result before recovering back. Connection would slow to a crawl, below 1Mbps before recovering back to 12Mbps and this was my observation with the noise margins.

Every switch to a new ISP meant that I had to inform my ISP to manually raise my noise margin dB. This was one reason why I remained a Sky customer for 4 years as I didn't want the hassle of informing my new ISP to make this change. But I only finally left Sky when their price were hiked too high.

Only FTTC solved my problems permanently! It could also be that a few unhappy customers out of the 100,000 are still on bad ADSL lines or their FTTC cabinet is very far away from their property.

I think when FTTP becomes fully available and ADSL/FTTC retires for good in future some of those complaints will be reduced as customers will naturally not have to deal with these problems any more.

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

In reply to a post by BLaZiNgSPEED:

The problem with these figures is that the complaints per 100,000 don't tell us if those are related to the actual customer service, reliability, speed, latency, billing process, price hikes, etc.

That's as far as i got.

As i said I have been with TT 15+ years and have had great service you have told us you have used both and prefer BT well good for you, time to move along i think

Indeed, if you are happy as a TT customer for 15+ years then that's great for you! But do bear in mind that you are overpaying for your service unless you are able to haggle with their customer service to keep your prices lower! For this reason you might want to consider your options.

Also, if you haven't tried other ISPs in those 15 years then you won't be able to compare your service to your existing TalkTalk provider. How will you know if your service is really the best you are getting? Even if you are happy with it!

For example, incidentally last night I had a drop in my connection after 173 days uptime! However, I knew this is unlikely to have been BT being unstable. This happened at around 2:30am so I knew this was a firmware upgrade!

Firmware version:

v0.44.00.04123-BT

Firmware updated:

8-Jan-2025

I checked the firmware and it has been updated to 8 of January. I always check this and at least this isn't a technical fault with the service or the router. It was a router reboot to upgrade the firmware of the BT Smart Hub 2 router.

I can confirm that from my checking with TalkTalk those connection problems were not related to firmware upgrades. Maybe you were fortunate to never have suffered from these problems. But I always had them every few weeks when I was with TalkTalk.

I guess my only complaint I would say that I have with BT and that goes with any other ISP is that the ISP supplied router firmware update cannot be disabled manually! If I had my own router I could disable automatic update. I don't have that option in the router settings. But other than this issue I have no other complaints with the actual service. It would've been great if at least ISPs informed us when they'll be pushing an upgrade for their routers.