back to article Please come back! TalkTalk woos customers with broadband offers

TalkTalk has spotted an opportunity to win back customers following its mega data breach in October 2015 with a flash sale broadband promotion. Most broadband providers are hiking prices this year, with BT the latest to announce an inflation-busting increase. Virgin Media's broadband and TV packages also went up by up to £3.49 …

  1. wolfetone Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    TalkTalk - For Those Who Love A Shit Service

  2. Dwarf

    Just remember why its cheap ...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cant stand that Dildo woman

    Raise prices in December and give that back as a promotion in the new year. WTF are thay playing at?

    That she still has a job after 3 hacks and the blame conveniently deflected on a spooty teenager in a shed, says volumes for this establishment supported numpty outfit.

    1. Peter2 Silver badge

      Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

      To be fair, talktalk is at the bottom of the market and the only reason for using them is price and they know it. I'm still not entirely certain why you'd reduce your prices when your the cheapest on the market though.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

        Desperate move to remind people that they're cheap?

        1. ad47uk

          Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

          while i am not a fan of Talk Talk, there are people who use it that are happy with the service and they get a good service, things have improved since FTTC have started up. TT ADSL was awlful.

          would i go for Talk Talk? i doubt it, but i am now out of minimum, contract with plusnet, but at the moment plusnet is fine for me.

      2. PeteA

        Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

        because you'd need to pay me to use them?

    2. wolfetone Silver badge

      Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

      "Raise prices in December and give that back as a promotion in the new year. WTF are thay playing at?"

      In the first week of January my 12 month deal period with BT ran out. Phoned them up and "wrangled" a deal with them which meant I would now be paying £6 per month less than what I was paying for the previous 12 months.

      2 weeks(ish) later, BT announce they're raising prices which will add £6 per month to my deal for this year.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

        "2 weeks(ish) later, BT announce they're raising prices which will add £6 per month to my deal for this year"

        At which point your existing contract is void and you're able to phone them up for another discount.

        Or bail out. Most of the smaller ISPs are highly responsive and aren't raising prices.

        1. wolfetone Silver badge

          Re: Cant stand that Dildo woman

          "Or bail out. Most of the smaller ISPs are highly responsive and aren't raising prices."

          We haven't had the letter yet, it's at that point we get 30 days to cancel.

          I have looked at others for the broadband, but the TV is a killer. Not for me, I don't really watch it although I will watch sports (rarely). It's the fiancee that's the overlord with the TV so we won't be ripping it out. So we agreed she'd put in £6 a month to keep BT going.

          But we're in some sort of cartel here in the UK. If you want the broadband and the TV, you have 3 choices. If you don't choose them, then you go for people like TalkTalk or Plusnet, but you're still feeding that monopoly.

  4. TWB

    A someone who left them

    ...I used to get better speeds with them (17Mbps) at times than I currently get with Plusnet (13Mbps) - but Plusnet seem slightly better and were cheaper and I have had OK-ish support from them so far....

  5. Feival

    I'm with Virgin and get the 100Mbps service. I don't care how cheap Talk talk is, I coudln't go back to those types of speeds...

  6. Zmodem

    landlines arn't worth the money, especially when most of the time its slower then 3g when your phone is tethered to your PC over bluetooth, £36 saving for a year would buy you sweet nothing

    if you don't care for watching movies too much, you can have 256kbs for £20 after 6gb fair use limit on giff gaff

    1. Dwarf

      256K for £20. Are you mad ?

      This is not 1980 !!!!

      1. Zmodem

        you have 3g or 4g at full speed for your first 6gb, then 256kbs for the rest of the month

        its a whole lot better then even having to begin to put up with BT scrubs, and £20 is a fair deal if you just troll a few sites and do some shopping, most movies are crap and not worth wasting your money on, nor is all the other junk on sky or internet tv or amazon prime

        there is nothing much to download if you don't play games, just windows updates and some other programs here and there

        1. Zmodem

          either way, i get my sim tomorrow so i'll see how fast non throttled connection is, 256kbs is better then 10kbs EE are throttling me too

        2. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
          Thumb Down

          "you have 3g or 4g at full speed for your first 6gb"

          No I wouldn't. Because giff-gaff use the O2 network, which is 2g only anywhere outside of large towns and cities.

          I can live without the dial-up speeds that they provide out in the sticks, tyvm

          1. Zmodem

            its better then EE = http://www.speedtest.net/result/6010616490.png

            the more you retest the slower it gets, and on the 4 or 5 test it will just time out or bore you to death, last month it was 5mb/s and i was downloading at 800kbs on steam which could hold a constant speed for hours, which is how my connection has been for a few years

            1. Zmodem

              so the way of BT, browsing the web works fast, downloading files is capped at 10kb/s

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      How can you actually live with 6Gb @ 256kbs? I chewed though over 300Gb this month, very little of which was movies.

  7. ramjam

    "For Everyone"

    It may be cheap, but no TalkTalk service is available to anyone (like me) with a 20CN Market A exchange.

    TalkTalk "For Everyone" - NOT

  8. Dave the Cat

    Come back? No chance. Talk Talk cooked their goose with their piss poor, sneering attitude to customer service.

    Talk Talk could offer to pay my line rental and service charge for life and I'd still opt to pay someone else.

    1. Hans 1
      Paris Hilton

      >Talk Talk could offer to pay my line rental and service charge for life and I'd still opt to pay someone else.

      Upvoted!

      Question: Assuming your details were leaked, I do not know of course, but, if that were the case it cannot get worse ... your details are out there and you need credit surveillance for life, might as well go with chalkTalk in that case, what else could go wrong ? Assuming TalkTalk are the cheapest & fastest in your area, that is ...

      1. Zmodem

        your details arn't nothing you can't find on the electoral register list, 750 million people, and the retarded government breaching their own data protection act

        http://www.192.com/people/electoral-roll/

  9. Lee D Silver badge

    I have a VM connection, but I also have a router which allows all kinds of load-balancing, including VDSL/ADSL, 4G, etc. along with the Ethernet I use for the VM connection.

    I've seriously considered, several times, reactivating a phone line that sits next to the router, which hasn't been activated in all the time I've lived in this particular house but is "live" (a little recorded voice talks to you if you plug a phone in).

    But the line rental for what would be a failover/load balance line just isn't worth it still. Let alone the broadband costs. Even with TalkTalk, and a special offer, I can't justify that amount of money on what will be a line with 1/5th the capacity of the VM cable, or half what I get on 4G (which the router also have a slot for). It will make no visible difference to my overall speed or reliability, and likely will actually cause more problems than it's worth if it gets misconfigured by BT as I've seen other lines do - where it says traffic is passing but nothing actually does, so the load balancer doesn't know that it's gone bad and keeps using it.

    Thank god for VM, because I'm actually spoiled with their connection now and in the rare instances it does go off (usually little herberts pulling open the cabinet down the road), it's back on quickly and 4G would more than suffice.

    It's a sad state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to activate ADSL/VDSL as even a backup line, it's so slow.

    I've done the same in workplaces, twice. I just convinced them to install a leased line rather than even try to run a business on ADSL/VDSL. In one of those instances, we dug a 500m trench for the fibre ourselves...

  10. Ben Rose
    Megaphone

    I'm on a Virgin "200 meg" connection. At peak times, I sometime get 30meg - apparently I suffer from a local congestion fault. It will be months until they can resolve it.

    I've been with Virgin since 1Meg "NTL" broadband days. I've always got the quotes speeds. DOCSIS3 gave me all of the 50meg it promised then I went to 152Meg and also got all the speeds. Then a "free" upgrade to 200meg (followed by the usual price increase) and since then my peak time speeds have been utterly useless. It makes watching things like iPlayer and All4 unusable at the time we want to watch them.

    Nothing to do with Talk Talk I guess :O)

    1. AlbertH
      Flame

      Liars, Damn' Liars and ISPs

      Virgin's "traffic shaping" and their little caveats throughout their small print means that you'll NEVER get anything approaching their quoted speeds. You might get (very) short bursts of high speed - if you're lucky. Virgin also sell all your browsing data to advertising companies.

      BT (if you pay for their most expensive VDSL service and are in a covered area) don't cap or restrict their service too much (I get an absolutely consistent 78 Mb/s down, 17.8 Mb/s up), but their DNS lookups are restricted (supposedly due to some Act of Parliament).

      Talk Talk are exactly what they claim to be - all Talk! They cannot deliver any kind of useful service at my Central London address, and my neighbours - on a different telephone exchange - get data rates that I used to get from a dial-up modem! They are incompetent and dissembling.

      Most ISPs are just reselling BT services, so they're all as bad as each other, and Virgin are a clueless, useless, sad joke. You'd think that Virgin - as a monopoly on cable services in the UK - would make sufficient effort that their service would be several times better than anything down twisted copper wires, so that they could take over the whole market - after all, the theoretical bandwidth down a coaxial cable is spectacular. Virgin just use their position to fleece their customers for an abysmal, intermittent "service".

      There doesn't appear to be ANY ISP in the UK that can provide a proper, fast, stable, uncapped, unrestricted service at any price. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

  11. Mozzart

    How they try to make more money

    On my last bill they tried to charge me £65 for an engineer visit which never happened.

    After numerous phone calls I think they now believe me!!!!!!!

  12. Mozzart

    Make up for cheap service

    They have tried charging me £65 for an engineer visit which has never happened.

    It took several telephone calls to convince them it never happened !!!!!!!!!!!

  13. IPTMan

    Their business product is far better

    As an original Nildram customer that got slowly dragged through the transformations of time into what is now TalkTalk I opted to stay with their business offerings right up to getting the FTTC LLU products in my area (Crawley). Have to say the service and speed is second to none - far better than the BT service installed from an ex employer (now thankfully deceased).

    One fault required me to call for support on a rainy Thursday evening and was met with a UK callcentre, knowledgeable staff and timely updates about the issue and resolution. Less than 24 hours later my service was restored with a courtesy call from Openreach. Yes - I was amazed too.

    As I'm the process of moving house the contract renewal call came through last month. No problem Sir, if you wish to renew take the complete package option and we'll knock the additional costs down so that you pay £3 per month less than you are now. Oh and you get two free premise moves in with that so your house move will be free when the time comes. The time came and I booked the new install two weeks ago - online request, responded to within 30 minutes and book within the hour. It arrives this week at the new premise as a simultaneous provide so line and service at the same time. I thought only BT and Plusnet could do that? Not fussed!

    TT Residential often gets a kicking but my experiences with TTB have been very good over the past 5 plus years. I might just be lucky... who knows!

  14. Chris King

    "TT Residential often gets a kicking..."

    And rightly so.

    It's cheap, bandwidth is massively over-subscribed, they filter and throttle everybody, and the tech support is frankly a nightmare. I've lost count of the number of times friends/colleagues asked me to sit in on support calls to act as "designated grown-up" or "bullshit filter".

    I can't comment on their Business offerings as I've never dealt with TT Business directly, but their Wholesale offerings (resold by other ISP's) aren't bad at all. I've got a AAISP Home::1 1Tb line on TalkTalk - apart from a few minor blips, it has been a consistent 70Mbit down/20Mbit up, rock-solid and runs at full tilt whatever time of day I choose to use it. No filtering, no "bandwidth management", and no peak time slow-downs - it's a VERY different beast to the miserable TT Retail experience.

  15. Walthamrod

    I got cought

    I was on a old contract and received between 5/6 meg like a Pratt I fell for the con of a fast broadband service but had to take out a 18 month contract my reward was I now get 1.5/1.8 meg. After an effort lasting 1 1/2 hours on 2 occasions I was able to speak to technical services and the service rose to 3.85 meg it lasted 1 1/2 hour.Don,t touch this lot the service only charges more for less. My advice is spend more a be able to receive a broadband service worth having.

    1. Zmodem

      Re: I got cought

      ISP's can't do nothing about your connection speed, BT won't let anyone into their exchanges

      the only way for your connection to get better, is to go through ofcom

  16. David Lawrence

    Never going back. Ever.

    My details got hacked, and I was getting nuisance calls several days before they came clean about the hack. Customer service was poor; their systems don't fully support someone moving from one property to another and wanting to take their old number with them. I had to set up a new email address when I moved because my old one was permanently linked to my old property even though that account was now closed (hints at a very badly-designed IT system underneath). I signed up to a new 18-month contract and then they increased their prices 3 weeks later. When I rang them to tell them I was moving again I was told that the phone and broadband would remain connected at the old property (and therefore would be used by the new occupants) until the end of their mandatory one-month notice period on such things. Then they tried to tell me I wouldn't be able to take my number with me unless I used them at my new property (which turned out to be a lie). Just awful. I will never use them again. Ever.

  17. poopoo

    It was never about price. My blind 91 year old mother in rural isolation and looking after her recuperating husband was left all winter without a phone. Months of screaming down to phone to script reading foreign call centres. I had to fight for a refund. Criminally inept. Talktalk? Nevernever!

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