TalkTalk

Firstly, some of the posts about TalkTalk problems are getting a little heated, especially now some TalkTalk call centre workers have posted. Try and keep everything vaguely cordial.

Secondly I have an update (sort of) regarding unbundling. I recently posted that the unbundling dates were 31st August. Well another post on Sam Knows said they were the dates Carphone Warehouse originally posted and haven’t actually been updated since. As such some people already are unbundled - most people aren’t.

To all those people with TalkTalk problems, the quality of your service may change.

I found this page on Sam Knows that is apparently a list of telephone exchanges with scheduling dates for TalkTalk unbundling. According to the information there, no exchanges have actually been switched completely to TalkTalk yet. When they do switch there should be a difference in quality. For most people it apparently couldn’t get worse so this should be seen as a good thing.

The date for the changeover is 31/08/06. I’m a little suspicious about the authenticity of those dates since a reasonable amount of physical activity is required to switch over and doing them all at once seems silly.

Some of the people trying to cancel their TalkTalk subscriptions have apparently had success email Charles Dunsonte, Carphone Warehouse’s CEO, directly. Two email addressed have been suggested. I haven’t personally tried either so I can’t guarantee any sort of result.

As I was looking at the website I suddenly realised they’d dropped the price by £1 a month if you don’t take the free international calls.

Odd move since I doubt it will increase sign ups much. Before you jump ship you may want to read about some of the TalkTalk problems or look at the alternatives such as Orange Broadband or Sky Broadband.

Now Orange (new owners of Wanadoo) are offering free broadband. It’s essentially the same setup as TalkTalk but more expensive and with a more limited service. If you have a £30 a month mobile contract with Orange you get free broadband with 2GB transfer a month. Although that isn’t as good as £20.99 a month and 40GB that TalkTalk give you, you do still get the £30 a month mobile phone contract so it could still be better for many people.

OF course the advert should be banned for the same reason the TalkTalk advert was banned in theory. Or more correctly, the TalkTalk one should be unbanned…

But only 2GB a month?

Well with my various posts about problems with TalkTalk I should probably point out that I did sign up. Less than a month later and it’s now live. And contrary to my expectations everything seems fine.

My router reports a connection speed of about 2.2 Mbit/s and I’ve had a combined download speed of about 120KB/s (including about 50KB/s from a peer-to-peer program). The only negative thing is that my modem and start up pack hasn’t arrived (my official go-live date was yesterday) but since I have a router and I’m perfectly capable of setting it up that’s not a major problem).

Also, my upstream bandwidth is apparently 288 Kbit/s. Not wonderful but good enough to stream reasonable video (I’ll post more about a cool app called Orb some other time.

My post about free broadband from TalkTalk has got a fair bit of traffic, in fact it’s been the most popular page since a day after I posted. I don’t think that implies the post is any good but just that lots of people are looking for info about the offer. According to the Register, Carphone Warehouse have had to withdraw their advert claiming “free broadband” since it’s bundled and therefore not free. Personally I disagree. Since the service it’s bundled with was available before at the same price, the broadband is still technically free. The same people that made this ruling by the way also said that unlimited doesn’t have to actually mean unlimited (as with most broadband “fair use” policies) if the terms are displayed. This is far easier to disagree with since calling it unlimited is wrong both simply and technically. Anyway the comments have revealed the following issues it seems:

• Limited P2P traffic - Sort of a non-issue since they clearly say they will limit peer-to-peer traffic. Worth noting if you didn’t know already though.
• Limited gaming traffic - They didn’t say explicitly that this could be throttled so more of a worry.
• Dodgy proxy server redirecting requests for non existent pages - Annoying and slightly disturbing although not a major problem. Installing Google Web Accelerator may solve this as it does it’s own proxying.
• Generally bad service - Quite a few complaints about the service not being fast etc. Not very quantitative but certainly bad for people switching to get more speed.

Although I haven’t read the terms, it may be possible to back out of the broadband free of charge. Since it is bundled after all (you’re paying for the calling plan) you may still be able to switch providers afterwards. You’ll still have to pay the £9.99 a month though but you could just make lots of calls… Phil Jones has an unofficial guide to setting up TalkTalk broadband that bypasses a lot of the problems and can help you solve others.

TalkTalk (from the Carphone Warehouse) are offering “free” broadband.

The deal is you sign up to TalkTalk as your phone provider (£11 line rental a month - the same as BT), take out one of the call plans for 18 months (£9.99 a month which includes unlimited* local, national and international** calls) and pay a £29.99 setup fee. For this you get up to 8Mb broadband (very likely to be lower though) with a 40Gb download limit and an ADSL modem.

Total cost (for 18 months): £407.81, about £22.66 a month. Seems like a good deal. TalkTalk

* Calls must last less than 70 minutes. ** To a list of 28 countries including America, Australia and most of Europe.