Author: Marc

3 months after moving into our new place, we finally have a decent broadband connection.

No thanks to Primus, our first choice of phone line provider – who never seemed to be able to hear or understand us at the other end of the phone. So we nipped that in the bud, and thought we’d go with Talk Talk instead, after hearing positive things about them from family members.

Well, after the usual delays and waits, we paid £70 for an engineer to come out and spend 10 minutes configuring the line, only to be left with a connection that struggled to reach 1Mbs. 1.2Mb was about as good as it got, and the pings were awful. After weeks of waiting on hold and speaking to first line, second line and third line support, they determined it must be the wiring in our apartment and we’d have to pay BT Openreach £160 (+60/hour) to fix it, and even then there’d be no guarantees of a speed increase. Are you having a laugh? We live a few hundred meters from the exchange, that can’t be right. 

We decided to quit that joke of a company and go with Virgin Media. It didn’t start well, with Virgin putting the “wrong type” of ADSL on our line, and not sending the router out until 3 days after our initial activation (although it was a fairly decent D-LINK, not a £1.50 own-branded one with only 1 Ethernet port,  like TalkTalk’s),  but after about 3 weeks we finally got a connection. The speed started at 1.2 Mbs, and then went up to 2Mbs a few hours later. Now 2 days later it’s reaching 7Mbs – on the same line Talk Talk couldn’t get over 1.2Mbs on. I’ll wait and see over the next few days if it stays at 7 or drops, or if it actually reaches the promised 10Mbs – but a ping of 30ms is much more like it, and despite the cock-ups, and am pleased so far with the service.

So my advice would be, avoid Talk Talk like the plague!