Talk Talk had a dire reputation a while back but have they improved? We’re moving house and looking for a cheap (as cash is really tight) but useable broadband/phone package.

Both Talk Talk and Tiscali offer affordable packages, including line rental, but Talk Talk charge £60 to activate a line whilst Tiscali charge £99. I’m assuming that as we’ll be moving in the current BT line will have been disconnected.

I thought TT recently bought Tiscali??

I’ve been with TT for ages now, initially it was fine getting set up and online but then when I moved house they took forever to get me online again – about 3 months. After a lot of hassle they eventually refunded me some money and cut my bill as “goodwill”. Having said that, they’re fine, I’ve had to call Tech Support twice (in 5 years) and both times they were excellent and very helpful. Occasional outages are due more to the line rather than TT themselves and they’re rare anyway.

oh my goodness, where do you want me to start?

plus points…
cheap

bad points…
seriuosly cr£p at setting up new accounts
slow broadband (1mb if i’m lucky – had 8mb with bt)
frequently drops connection
frequently can’t get a connection
always pathetic reliability at peak times
frequently spend 30mins to an hour trying to talk to someone, only to be given another number to call.
frequently spend 30mins to an hour on hold for second number.
spend days doing both above, get prob sorted. fine for a week then back to bad again.

google them, you will see many many people have similar complaints.

also look at sky, their inclusive tv/broadband/phone works out cheaper and i’m shifting to it as soon as my 18mntsh of torture with talktalk are over.

My connection is a consistent 6mbps wireless, 7 on wired. The LBS gets a consistent 7.5 (he’s only a few metres from the exchange). Very few problems with reliability or connection.

No problems here, been with them over a year, took 3 hours for them to change me over from my old ISP & my speed increased from 4M to 6.5M – very happy with them.

steer clear of TT – completely useles. Ones to try are sky and bethere (also available for less if you’re with an o2 customer). Both are at least twice the speed and consistently provide a really reliable service from my experience.

We had no problems with them when we used them for our work lines.

Have been with Tiscali for ~ 4 years. They started off really good and I was impressed, but now I’m not getting the speed I used to get (6-7.5mb/s on a *2Mb/s deal!*
Current 8Mb/s more like 4.5 on a good day but can get slooooooowww and a bit intermittent. I think recently there’s been a slight improvement.
As mentioned up there, Talk Talk have bought out tiscali about 2 weeks ago, the deal having to go through the authorities to rubber stamp. I have no idea what that will mean to my service!

Also, if you look above, some people have good experiences, some poor….. I think it’s a ” you pays yer money, you takes yer chance” situation with a lot of ISP’s, as it seems to me people have a variety of experiences with isp’s.
best of luck in your choice!
Q

Well I signed up with them, got all the kit to set it up. Never got connected to the internet in 2 months, so told them where to stick it and then they had the cheek to try and charge me for the whole contract term.

Complete waste of time.

plusnet do bb for £5.99 per month 10gb per month usage, looks good. I’m going to switch to them soon as Sky have changed their call charges on 0845 from 0.5p to 6p per minute (off peak)

No complaints here for Talk Talk.
Saved us a lot of money switching, is fast enough for our purposes and we’ve had no connection problems.
Their webmail is a bit clunky and sometimes goes down briefly, but not the internet.

Just switched over to them, so far looking good. Getting 13Mbps down which is nice.
Their webmail is rubbish, but thats because they use AOL!

Anyone expecting to get 8Mbps on an ADSL Max service is going to be disappointed. You’ll never get 8Mbps unless your on the doorstep of the exchange.