Hello.
Yep, as the title suggests.
My go live date was Thursday the 7th of July. It was supposed to be some time that day up to midnight.
However there was no activity and the red light on the new super router stayed on all the time despite numerous re-boots and power offs etc as per the requests of the annoying call centre staff that just read from pre-determined scripts after asking you the same questions each time you call them.
You have to call them because Nobody Ever calls you back despite the promises etc.
I end up talking to India, the Philippines or another country with similar language barriers that inhibit the explanation of the issue.
I started calling Friday morning on the 8th of July to ask what was happening because the day before I was enjoying my 78MB Fibre supply from PlusNet, but had decided to move over to TalkTalk because of the offer I saw on National TV.
I have been calling pretty much every day to see what’s going on only to be told it is being "Escalated" to a higher Manager.
Well, I don't know how high the Escalation chain is in TalkTalk land, but it must by now be half way to the moon.
I lost a day’s annual leave waiting in for an appointment that it seems was never made despite what I was told.
I then waited in for an appointment between 08:00 and 13:00 this Friday gone, the 15th of July, which was the only one I could have due to either the Open reach engineer or my working schedule.
However he came round at 08:40, I knew something was going on because the house phone kept beeping and showing "check line" and then he phoned me and said he would be there in a few mins after closing the main cabinet just round the corner from my house.
Now TalkTalk told me the reason I had no Internet was because BT had not switched over the wires in the main exchange on the 7th, but the engineer assured me they had been switched over on that day at 08:47 in the morning, so why is TalkTalk saying this is not the case, and why does nobody seem to know what they are doing?
So, here I am, ten days later, and still NO Internet, which means No PS4 for some fun downtime, no emails at home, no streaming films or TV, no on-line banking, no paying my OVObills on-line because it's cheaper to do it on-line with no paper bills, but of course that is only any good if you can actually get On-Line.
The engineer performed lots of tests and checks to rule out absolutely anything because he does not want to waste any more time as there was absolutely no need for him to visit in the first place, we both knew this, because if everything was running perfectly fine the day previous, and all you have done is unplug two wires from one router and plug them into a new router, then what would you expect to have gone wrong?
Anyway, as he suspected and showed me on his equipment I was getting totally un-restricted speeds of upwards of 19MB. Line synching was great, the Ping and latency were perfectly fine.
Now if TalkTalk can't even see the router from their end then this suggests as suspected that there is no traffic through the system.
I have spoken to yet another person this morning, who also promised me that he would get someone to call me either tonight or in the morning and that it would be fixed by tomorrow evening at the latest (Sunday)
I told him if it was not then I would be going round to my bank on Monday morning and cancelling the direct debit and making sure they do not pay anything out.
I would also expect to receive a pre-paid bag to send the router back.
Never in my professional career have I experienced such poor service as this, and if any of my staff ever treated a customer of mine like this then they would soon find themselves looking for alternative employment.
There appears to be no leadership, and no ownership of responsability. If I were dealing with this then I would give the customer my name and tell them I will personally look into it and give then a time that I will be calling them at and make sure that I stuck to the promise and give them detailed feed-back on what I am doing and when it would be done by.
Companies should not be able to advertise services like this on National TV and not deliver them. If there is a problem or issue then you should at the very least inform your customer of what’s going on, not bounce them from one country to another with no help or explanation.
The gentleman I talked to this morning did seem to have something about him, and agreed Ten Days is astonishing and unacceptable.
The longest I have ever been without the Internet before this was around ten or fifteen minutes.
If I'm not connected with the promised speed and stability by tomorrow night, then I will send a detailed letter with all the times and dates along with the names of the individuals I have spoken to thus far to the head office address down south here in the UK.
I will also send a copy to OFCOM, Trading Standards and the Monopolies commission for unscrupulous behaviour and market monopoly under false promises, and ask that they investigate TalkTalk.
I will also post this over ALL of my social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc etc.
I hope this goes some small way in getting across how angry I am at being treated like this.
Mr Williamson.