Talk Talk - Avoid them if you live in the UK!

Communities Blog
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So a little rant here, but i feel this should be shared...

ISPs can be deceptive, they say we can offer so many mbps and we know that we dont get that amount, there have been cases that you hit the magic mark, a friend of mine hit 100mbps on virgins fibre connection, although he dont now lol.

Anyways im here to talk about TalkTalk and why you should avoid them.

1 - Awful customer support

I have had multiple problems with my personal network over the years, some not so bad some where terrible to the point i have had to contact the so called technical support team (Pft)

They go through the basic questions, have you reset your modem/router have you done this that blah blah...

That is about as far as their support goes, they tried giving me a new modem, free but i asked what is the speed? B/G/N/A? and he couldnt answer me that, now i understand these are people that are in a call centre and may not have any training in networking, but they should give at least the basic understanding of network talk.

Anyways i didnt get one, I have a Netgear which far out performed there routers. I then asked if i can switch my exchange location, oh no not possible, the nearest one to me is Leeds i believe and im currently connected to one down south somewhere they still wont change my location... which really couldnt be hard, wouldnt mind even been on the net 1 day for it tbh...

2 - They treat there customers like people with the IQ of about 2

Now i have dealt with technical guys before, a rather nice lad from BT i had to speak to about my mothers internet at her work place, talked technical to me and explained everything he was saying to her in pure basic terms.

I have spoken to TalkTalk support on the phone about my network only a month ago, and it was some india i believe, couldnt be sure, but anyways he was the most infuriating person to speak to, kept trying to put me down (e.g No Fibre is this not what you say) not as your crap at what you do way. still i persisted and it actually came to the fibre talk, saying its wireless signals sent from my local TV tower, Ok then,  i dont think wireless over that range is 1 safe or 2 reliable anyways he was sure it was... So yeah be ready for a fight if your on TalkTalk and god help you if you have to talk to one of their monkeys...

3 - Uber shocking ISP speeds...

Now as said, i know we never reach our max ISP speed, there has been times where it has been done but not normally, my mother pays for 25mbps speed on the home network and we get 3/3.5DL and 700kbps UL now, my gfs dad has Virgin i believe around 30/40mbps (Old ass connection) and can hit around 3mbps on a crap torrent (try torrenting linux from torrent site as practice), and higher on a actual FTP/HTTP download from servers i can have a windows PC setup with software such as Adobe on their connection in about 30m/1h (Design and Creative suite) takes me around 4 hours :(

So yes avoid the ISP for speed...

4 - Stability

They used to be good for stability i got them for when i used to play world of warcraft, i have a strong but not exactly fast connection, but worked, that was around 3yr ago maybe longer, now it can crash at any time, even reset doesnt fix it and they blame you for messing with it and they say its your hardware, i have an ASUS modem a 2011 model up in my room as a switch (was given to me) and i can connect my PC both laptops and xbox to it and have no problems, same as my modem downstairs (Keep in mind my ASUS doesnt give out a wireless signal) anyways it can die anytime and just be a plain pain in ass....

 

So i have given a few ideas on why to avoid these lot. if anyone has an idea how i can get my ISP to change my exchange location please share, im getting 3mbps avg and 5 on a good day and my UL never moves.

If your in the market in the UK for a new ISP get Sky/Virgin or maybe BT there supposed to be getting better but id say Virgin personally (Fibre connection only) Sky if you want a non fibre connection as for me im stuck on this for now, i was going to post on their forums also, but they dont deserve to spam my email, so i thought id warn you fine people on here!!

Happy Hunting!

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All ISP's have quite poor customer support. As you go on to mention in point 2, yes you may not have an IQ of 2 but not everyone is tech savy so they have to accomidate to the majority of people.

If you wish to speak to someone who knows something, just ask to be put through to the engineer's if possible.

 

Now I know this is a rant, but I am going to annoy you. You use the term of speed and data size interchangably. Mb = Megabits, MB = MegaBytes.

8 bits make 1 Byte. 25Mb/s DL speed is equivilant to 3.5MB/s.

Unless you are with either BT or Virgin in the UK, you will not get any good speeds or ping times. As pretty much all the ISPs loan the line of BT/Openreach to get you connectivity and virgin lays its own copper/fibre.

As for torrent speed, that depends on the number of seeds (aka people uploading it and their internet upload).

ASUS modem a 2011 model up in my room as a switch

 

 You mean a router with in built modem.

Also If you are using a 3rd Party Modem other than the one provided to you by your ISP, double and triple check your settings. Especially your modulation and encryption type. Else as they may say the modem/router could well be dieing. If possible check your connection with another modem.

Lastly, you can not change an exchange. You are connected to the local exchange like all the other people in your area with the exchange acting as a switch. (Like a star network topology) and it utilises 1 or more connections to your ISP servers to provide internet connectivity.

Your overall poor performance could be that your ISP has not bough enough line bandwidth for the amount of users on your exchange or (which is more likely the case) the exchange needs replacing/upgrading. As BT is doing this as the exchanges were never designed to handle the amount of traffic now being passed through them.

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Hmm, well i spoke to the so called technical team and currently waiting for the engineers to call me back, but they said "Your line can only use 6mbps yet we pay for the 25mbps package, and yes i understand that i wont get like 10mbps but im getting kb in stuff like steam for downloads not mb at all, they said oh its not acceptable isnt this connection, and they say now my exchange is my local town, which is just down the road, but still im getting shocking speeds, and i understand how seeders work also, but the fact if i did the same torrent here and at my GFs house i would get a major increase of speed at theirs over mine, more of a rant about how i hate talktalk though lol, i just wish i could change to sky/virgin but all boils down to money but thanks for the input :)

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If you think there bad you shud try virgin media one of there 'tec guy's' told me that firefox wasn't compatible with there internet service and this was why my(at the time before the free upgrade) 20mb broadband was only at 1mb/s down and 22kb/s up speed.

After arguing with this idiot for at least 10mins i broke my mobile phone when it gently bounced off the wall.

 Oh and lets not forget there £10 latepayment fee and chargeing you £5 you to pay a bill with a debit card or credit card. 

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wow, you guys have it bad, I work in the industry of internet supply in New Zealand and although we are practicly in the dark ages of adsl2, and only a few companies that provide here are bad, but most of them are decent, mind you they are normally all on shore, not outsourced

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I think I will point out that what they are selling you is 25 Megabits, not 25 Megabytes. There are 8 bytes in every bit, so at that rate, you should be getting around 3.2 Megabytes down on any given download. Even people with 100 mbps lines can only get around 12.5 Megabytes down. So you're actually not getting a bad deal.