Against my better judgement, I've just signed up with Talktalk. I wouldn't have even considered it a month ago, but a mate of mine has been doing some work in one of their data centres recently and was telling me how impressive it was and that they've thrown a lot of money at their network recently.
I wanted a connection ASAP that I could sort out on my mobile in the middle of the night. Sky wouldn't let me sign up online because I've had broadband at this address less than 12 months ago, and I couldn't be bothered ringing them. I was going to sign up with Plusnet. However, the line to the property had been disconnected and needed re-activating, for which Plusnet wanted to charge me £80, and couldn't book me an appointment for nearly 3 weeks.
So, I found myself on the Talktalk website. Talktalk didn't charge for the line connection, I paid 12 months line rental up front for £126 and the broadband is £2.50 a month. They've given me £40 back through Quidco. My thinking was if it was that bad I could just write it off and move. Under £10 a month for phone and unlimited broadband isn't at all bad.
My go-live date was Tuesday. I arrived home on Tuesday, phoneline dead and no ADSL sync on the router. I tried again on Wednesday morning, line still dead. Here we go I thought.
Everything was showing as active on my account, so I called them on my mobile on Wednesday - helpfully they publish a proper number as well as 0870. I reported it as a fault with the line being dead - didn't need to speak to anyone, it was all automated and did a line test, found there was a fault and booked an Openreach engineer to look at it.
Openreach rang me on Thursday morning asking if I could let them in - the line had been connected as per the given routing, but the engineer didn't think it was right as he couldn't detect a phone. I couldn't get home, so he said he'd have another look in the cabinet anyway and he might be able to fix it today, but without access he couldn't guarantee it and that I needed to contact Talktalk to get them to book me a proper appointed job when I would be in.
I'd resigned myself to speaking to India at this point, when a text came through on my phone asking if I wanted to book an appointment via phone or SMS. I went the SMS route, and then sent me a list of AM and PM appointments over the following few days, including Saturday. I went for Saturday AM.
I was away on Thursday, but got home Friday night to find the phone working and the broadband on! The engineer turned up this morning as appointed, he was aware of the situation and said he'd run a quick circuit check to ensure everything was connected correctly, which it was.
The engineer admitted this problem was because Openreach had the wrong routing for the address on their system and it was no fault of Talktalk.
I'm pleased that what could have turned into a major pain the bum has been sorted out so quickly. I've had situations in the past where ISP's and Openreach don't seem to communicate at all. Talktalk seem to have this down to an art as it's all automated and the customer is informed at every stage - they've text me when the engineer is on his way, when he's looked at it, automated booking an appointment, and then finally they asked me to confirm by text it was fixed. For any minor faults or customer service issues, their members forum seems to be the place to sort those out. It seems if you're talking to India, you're doing it wrong.
I've been with Sky and Zen in the past at this address, the sync speed is the same as I was getting with Sky, and the throughput actually seems to be a bit better. I've been streaming HD content from iPlayer and Netflix most of the day and it hasn't buffered once.
So far, Talktalk have significantly exceeded my admittedly low expectations.
If I'd gone with Plusnet, I'd still be 12 days away from my line activation date.
