Chicken bald back

[Willow]

I'm switching my broadband provider away from BT - too many failures of service and everytime it takes hours on the phone to India and days to fix. We had 2 major outages in June alone. This last weekend it was out from Friday evening until Tuesday and by Monday they were insisting the problem was fixed whereas it quite clearly wasn't. Whenever the problems are fixed the call centre agents never have a clue what was actually done to fix it or what the actual problem was.

 

So in our area our alternatives to BT are TalkTalk and Sky.

 

I would be happy to pay a premium for good customer service and a UK based call centre. (My hearing is getting worse as I get older and I'm finding it more and more of a struggle to work out what the Indian call centre agents are saying). I don't want Sky tv but I see that isn't compulsory to get their broadband package.

 

So does anyone have any experience of Sky BB and TalkTalk BB customer service ? and number of outages ?

[Daphne]

I remember that last time somebody asked about TT most people said they were hopeless My experience of TT hasn't been bad at all, but my Mum has had problems with TT when there was a BT problem with the cabling in the road which required Openreach to come and dig it up. She couldn't understand the Indian TT call centre and it took a lot of time and effort to resolve not having either broadband or a phone, although really it wasn't TT's fault, but BT.

 

In terms of continuity of service my Mum has only had this one problem. After our exchange was upgraded we had no problems, but before that it was a bit hit and miss.

[percy049]

We used to be with TalkTalk and they were hopeless, and have switched to BT.

 

In our area, TalkTalk was very slow and kept 'going off', with unhelpful call centres. They also decided to renew some sort of contract with us without informing us, and then charged us a £80 severance fee

[soapdragon]

Personally I would rather remove my own spleen with a grapefruit spoon than use TT.

[Bramble]

I was resisting posting on this thread, as I have no personal experience, but now that others have said similar, I will add that I've never met anyone with anything good to say about TT!

[mullethunter]

Ditto Bramble

[Princess Leia]

If customer service is important, look at Zen Internet (assuming they cover your area - check that at the link below). They consistently top the scale on that front. OH used them for quite a few years and found them excellent.http://www.zen.co.uk/

[The Dogmother]

Personally I would rather remove my own spleen with a grapefruit spoon than use TT.

 

I think my dad would agree with you on that - he had dreadful problems too.

[Willow]

Thank-you all!!

 

I removed TalkTalk from the list!! I rang Sky but accidentally read the wrong screen and rang the uswitch people which was useful as they did some more checking and found Plusnet also served our area and they have a Sheffield based call centre so I went with them.

 

I had nearly gone with TT on the grounds they could not possibly been any worse than BT. This last outage the Indian call centre guys insisted the problem could not be fixed unless we took out a new contract so that we got a new homehub and passed the call through to the BT sales folks. It didn't occur to my husband that the referring agent would almost certainly get commission And funnily enough once he'd taken out a new contract but before we'd been provisioned and with all the same equipment our end the fault was fixed! Fortunately we had a 14day cooling off period so I was able to cancel today and revert to the old BT contract until the new Plusnet contract kicks in. Hope that agent doesn't get his commission

[Lavenders_Blue]

Nothing particularly useful to add except to agree that TT can be worse than useless at times (like you we are limited with which broadband providers cover our area). Their latest wheeze seems to be to have 'upgraded' our package to include something we don't want (TalkTalk TV) and then charge us ~£8 per month more for the privilege. To say I am not happy is an understatement!

 

Personally I would rather remove my own spleen with a grapefruit spoon than use TT.

 

You own a grapefruit spoon?

[Daphne]

Thinking about it, the grapefruit spoon would give you a bit of pointy help for spleen removal

 

It would be much harder with a soup spoon

[soapdragon]

Yes, I do have a set of grapefruit spoons - came with posh cutlery set that we had as a wedding gift 25 years ago (set also had soup spoons )

 

Mind you, we are not big on grapefruit in our house - can't seem to eat them without squirting myself in the eye with juice even using the correct cutlery

 

Surgically, tho, grapefruit spoons do leave something to be desired which nicely illustrates my considered opinion of TalkTalk

 

(Still perfferabe to a fish slice, tho, but set did not include one of those!)

[Lewis]

I've had problems in the past and work in telecomms so know just how annoying loss of service can be.

 

Do you know what the cause of your problems has been?

If its distance from the exchange, old underground wiring etc then no matter which provider you use, the lines are all owned by BT and still the same.

 

We get lots of rural customers far from the exchange with 30 year old lines move to other providers who have promised a better service, but if they're using the same BT lines then they'll get the same problems!

 

We used to be with Sky at home but we're now with Virgin Media who don't use the BT network.

[chickencam]

Please excuse me for hijacking this thread but can anyone advise on a comparison with Sky and Virgin Media for fast broadband. We are currently with BT and their service both with the broadband itself and customer service is poor. We have had TV from Sky in the past and have been happy with their service but feel that maybe we would have better broadband and flexibility with Virgin. ED has Virgin at uni and has not a problem with band width or streaming which we do regularly with our infinity

 

I have ended up with an 18 month contract just to get a new hub which has helped slightly but it is still poor when a couple of people are doing high bandwidth usage things. Our BT TV contract is ending in September and the broadband in March next year.

[UKMARCH]

I've had problems in the past and work in telecomms so know just how annoying loss of service can be.

 

Do you know what the cause of your problems has been?

If its distance from the exchange, old underground wiring etc then no matter which provider you use, the lines are all owned by BT and still the same.

 

We get lots of rural customers far from the exchange with 30 year old lines move to other providers who have promised a better service, but if they're using the same BT lines then they'll get the same problems!

 

We used to be with Sky at home but we're now with Virgin Media who don't use the BT network.

 

I hate to say this but we're with TT and haven't had any problems although we were with F2S before which was taken over so maybe why and we've never had to deal with customer service. The only time we've ever had loss of service was due to a BT problem. I have thought about changing several times but wonder if problems occur also when changing supplier so have been reluctant. It is such a big part of everyday tasks now that its hard to do without it.

[Geoid]

Please excuse me for hijacking this thread but can anyone advise on a comparison with Sky and Virgin Media for fast broadband. We are currently with BT and their service both with the broadband itself and customer service is poor. We have had TV from Sky in the past and have been happy with their service but feel that maybe we would have better broadband and flexibility with Virgin. ED has Virgin at uni and has not a problem with band width or streaming which we do regularly with our infinity

 

I have ended up with an 18 month contract just to get a new hub which has helped slightly but it is still poor when a couple of people are doing high bandwidth usage things. Our BT TV contract is ending in September and the broadband in March next year.

I have Virgin at uni and Sky at home. Virgin is miles better than Sky. The internet is fast all the time, no slowing down at peak times. Virgin's customer service has been excellent too, broadband failed one night, quick phone call (no waiting for call to be answered!) and it was promptly resolved. Unlike a similar experience with Sky which took several days to be resolved then they wanted payment too!

[chickencam]

Thanks Fred, that is really useful information

[Willow]

Do you know what the cause of your problems has been?

If its distance from the exchange, old underground wiring etc then no matter which provider you use, the lines are all owned by BT and still the same.

 

Lewis we both have telecoms expertise. Frustratingly we categorically know the problem is not in the access network (although obviously that is where many people do have a problem), but we always waste a day whilst they test the line a few times. Through our equipment we can see there is an internet connection but we are not being given access to it. The problem is with how we as a user are being given access, I suspect a server used to store user objects for our account is failing regularly. If that is the problem and BT did re-provisioning us it may fix the problem as the user objects are likely to end up somewhere else but I don't know if they would actually re-provision us if we started a new contract with them and object to being tied in for another 12 months to fix their problem (and that may not be the problem, I have limited data available, they have access to more if they would look). I can't get past the non-technical support guys in India who seem to feel that as a woman I have no clue what I'm talking about