Slightly odd conversation with MrsSwadey this morning that started with "while you were riding yesterday someone from Talk Talk came round" and ended with "so we are in a 14 day cooling off period"!

It seems a good deal, just wondering what experiences people have with them – can they be any worse than Virgin media?

My mum has talktalk, I was thinking about going to it aswell, but she sometimes can't get into her emails for a while and occasionaly can't get internet access at all, presumably at peak periods. I decided not to bother.

i use talktalk broadband and it works well for me ,no problems.

Had it for a few years and generally it's OK. Go through phases where the connection drops, better at the moment and very occaisionally the mail servers seem to go down. All in all an OK but not brilliant service, speed is a bit slow (we're quite a way from the exchange) but it is fairly cheap, our whole package is around £ 24 per month which includes free calls to most numbers.

Technical support is pretty much like many of the others, unless you have a simple problem that the script will fix you might as well not bother. Pretty unlikely they'll admit it's their equipment that's at fault. Tried to convince us it was our router which was the problem despite the fact we also sometimes lost the dial tone, even with the router unplugged.

So cheap package, cheap service levels but useable. Don't think many of the other providers are up to uch either. Still the same copper cables to the house.

We've been with them for a while and it's fine – loads faster than our previous broadband.

Only problem we had was that they told us the other broadband contract would be cancelled & sorted out by them, but wasn't so we ended up paying for Orange for broadband for a couple of months, even though they weren't actually supplying it.

Tiscali has just been swallowed by TalkTalk. I'm not sure if that is anything more than useless info.

wouldn't bother, i work in the "industry" and have heard nothing but horror stories about Talk Talk and Tiscali

I've been using TalkTalk for about 4 years and they've been generally fine after some teething troubles. The USB modem they supplied was rubbish.

They're not bad – I've had a couple of tech issues sorted out by them fairly quickly. Occasional dropped connection and it was slow for a while but miraculously picked up after a complaint to them. A mate reckons they throttle the connection speed deliberately…

When I moved house they were dreadful – took forever for them to move my account from previous to current address and get me set up online (about 3 months).

As a general rule now they're fine – consistent 5 ish mbps.

I've been with them for 18 months & they're an improvement over BT.
stumpyjon – if you're losing your dialtone, thats usually a cabling issue that can effect broadband speed.

Tiscali are fine until you need them to do something other than maintain a connection. New starter? Fault at the exchange that you KNOW isn't in your line etc – expect to wait 1 month while they pretend to call you back and pretend to escalate it to BT for checking but never do. I had to launch a website recording and documenting every conversation and detailing the outcomes before they'd fix it. When I did launch the site it was fixed in 2 days. But generally I get 6.5meg 10pm-6pm and have never yet had a break in service.

But I can't stress how frustrating their customer service is, and how full of disgraceful liars it seems to be.
"why do I have to call you every time you say you'll call me?"…
"we called at 14:43 sir, no-one answered, so we are waiting for you to call back"
"yes, yes you did, but you only let it ring once and I couldn't even move from my seat to the phone in time to answer it before you hung up"
"oh no sir, we let it ring for at least 30 seconds"
"I was sitting RIGHT NEAR THE PHONE, this JUST HAPPENED"

Every time there was an excuse for not calling back, I ended up spending about £20 in calls to their 10?p/min line just to get them to admit that someone had patched me incorrectly at the exchange. Fortunately they conceded when I demanded compensation for the costs and refused to pay the first months service.

My brothers had endless problems with them
and as I work in IT and he's a computer illiterate I get the pleasure of trying to get it sorted 👿

Net connection goes up and down randomly all the time, and their telephone support has been bloody useless every time I've had to call them,
half the time their systems are down and they can't help and ask you to call back in a hour as they can't do anything, this is after spending 15 mins in a queue on the phone which isn't free phone number