Line Rental now £11. (Two increases in a couple of months.)

18 month contract with expensive get out clause.

Expensive Peak 0845 calls.

Expensive Premium Rate Technical Support.

0870 Customer Service Line.

They block  P2P.

Also note that Free Weekend Calls for Life On Talk 1 now abolished.

This Forum is worth a read:http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=talktalk.

TalkTalk will be hard sold out of Carphone Warehouse Shops and to all existing TalkTalk customers and anyone else at all on the CPW marketing mailing lists.  As usual with CPW it will be a triumph of marketing bamboozle and spin over fairness, truth or especially plain honest decent service that even Gerald Ratner would be proud of.

The apparent advantage of CPW is if you are in a home with a husband and wife and 2 or 3 kids is that you now get All Calls (apart of course from all the calls to 084 and 087 which CPW's disgraceful submission to Ofcom NTS Way Forward is working so hard to make sure don't get any less in number even though it has historically sold Talk3 deceitfully as being to "all uk landlines") and "free broadband" for what appears only £9.99 a month on top of a standard extortionate £11 phone line rental that the incompetent fools at Ofcom are doing absolutely nothing at all to encoourage to come down.

Mr and Mrs Average will be all naive and believeing in the way they are with the Timeshare and Life Assurance salesman and foolishly sign on the dotted line for 18 months only to discover later the horror of not all broadband being the same and this service being slower than a dog at peak times and even more fraught with problems and not working than Tiscali broadband already is notorious for.  Of course many of Mr Dunstone's ideal customers still use dial up and so when they move to his slow as a dog broadband (only ever delivering high speeds at 3am) they will not realise they are gettting a shoddy cheap lousy service as they only be used to dial up and TalkTalk broadband will be just slightly faster than dial up used to be.  Even then their techncially savvy 16 year old will compare with his mates and tell mum and dad they are being ripped off.

As I am on an exchange reasonably unlikely to be be unbundled any time in the next couple of years (country exchange with 1900 lines that is probably in the last 25% of uk homes although not the last 5 to 10% like neighbouring exchanges with only 200, 300 and 600 lines clearly are) I will not even face this dilemma and the only thing that will no doubt come out of the new Ratner flavoured CPW deal is hopefully lower prices from other conventional broadband providers and a big pressure on BT Wholesale to lower its prices to other ISPs on non unbundled exchanges where current broadband prices are going to start to look rather high.

Well there you are as I'm based at home 7 days a week now and have just moved to ADSLMax with Freedom2Surf where I seem to be getting around 6Mbps most of the time downstream and 0.4Mbps upstream most of the time about half a mile from the exchange my broadband is too important to me to consider the Ryanair or ValueJet of broadband.  Annd who knows what kind of broadband service I would actually get from Crapners if they ever see fit to  try to market or make available their overblown marking hype of a shoddy service to us straw chewing country folk!

Of course another snag with moving to Crapners broadband would I am sure be that as they also control your brodaband service that they would soon start blocking your Voip ports to any form of Voip phone provider other than their own.

All excellent points.  Thank you I've been on a long long assignment (I could tell you about it but then I'd have to kill you) hence my not being around and not being on the ball with all things to do with OfCON and telecoms in general.  I will make a return soon though!! 

I'm definitely giving this broadband offer a miss - there are so many hidden conditions which I fear many have already fallen prey to, judging by the speed of their website at the moment.  They have 16 pages of T&Cs which obscures the important information.  Also there is a £30 connection fee which seems to have been omitted from the key promotional information, like the advert I've just seen on TV which proclaims "free broadband".      It probably wouldnt' be so bad if not for the 18month minimum contract which also ties all calls to them.  

As it happens my local exchange has been "unbundled" but what I couldn't understand was how TalkTalk were going to offer 8MB when BT locally only offers 2MB?   I phoned to ask what speed I'd get and was told that "it would be 8MB".  That was after they took my postcode and phone number.     We are still with them for Talk1 + World    and we're milking them dry with the amount of calls we make to USA after 6pm.  I am the root of all evil...

Well I hadn't got round to reading any of their promotional stuff, but you've all convinced me that free is not free.

It beats me why they got so much free advertising on the BBC

andy9 wrote on Apr 13^th, 2006 at 1:26am:


For once andy9 I cannot agree with you more.  When I heard the coverage on the BBC radio news on Tuesday evening I was absolutely furious that the BBC should just fall uncritically for such a misleading press release (as they did with the misleading Ofcom press announcement claiming that overcharging for 0870 calls was going to be brought to an end) instead of also getting the opinions of other broadband providers, who would I am sure have been happy to say what is wrong with TalkTalk's new offer.

As with pairs of shoes or suits or ice cream not all broadband is of the same quality and you very much get what you pay for.  And once again due to the quite spinelessly weak uk telecoms regulator people are allowed to sell as 8MB broadband a product that does not even Sync at that speed to most homes from the exchange and then may only run at at few hundred k data rate speed with someone like TalkTalk due to excess contention ratio and a totally inadequate backbone network.

It is more and more becoming obvious to me that half the journalists in this country only simply reprint press releases and that high quality investigative journalism of the Face The Facts or Panorama kind is very much the exception rather than the rule.  Oh for a Panorama program on Ofcom investigating  a "regulator hijacked by the telecoms industry".

The free 0870 customer number only works from your landline.Not much good if your phone is faulty.

Smasher wrote on Apr 13^th, 2006 at 9:51pm:


Don't forget to also write to the BBC Radio equivalent program called Feedback re their radio news coverage on the TalkTalk scam describing it as free broadband.  The radio viewer response program is considerably more intelligent and upmarket than the television one and a past effort to write to them on the 0870 issue nearly got an item on the program (although it seems to have been spiked by the Producer  )

See www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/feedback or email feedback@bbc.co.uk