News - Ofcom fines TalkTalk £3 million

[HEXUS]

The ISP continued to incorrectly bill its customers after being told to sort it out.

Read more.

[Bagpuss]

Ofcom should fine them for the abysmal bandwidth throttling that is happening on the TalkTalk network that they are telling no one about....

Everytime the school kids break up for a holiday, my speed drops by 30-50%....then 'miraculously' when the kids go back to school, my speeds go back to the level they should be...

It's rather obvious that they dont have enough bandwidth to serve their customers without resorting to such shoddy, underhand tactics..

Thankfully my contract expires in November, so i'm off to Virgin and their 50mb connection, and yes i know Virgin also throttle bandwidth, but at least they are upfront and honest about it, rather than the con artists at TalkTalk, who wont even acknowledge they are rationing customers connections...

[watercooled]

Are they saying the same to VM? They also regularly get bills wrong and seem to randomly increase prices for no reason - you have to constantly keep an eye on the bill and spend ages on the phone sorting it out. Ofcom seems to overlook VM a lot of the time...

[watercooled]

Ofcom should fine them for the abysmal bandwidth throttling that is happening on the TalkTalk network that they are telling no one about....

Everytime the school kids break up for a holiday, my speed drops by 30-50%....then 'miraculously' when the kids go back to school, my speeds go back to the level they should be...

It's rather obvious that they dont have enough bandwidth to serve their customers without resorting to such shoddy, underhand tactics..

Thankfully my contract expires in November, so i'm off to Virgin and their 50mb connection, and yes i know Virgin also throttle bandwidth, but at least they are upfront and honest about it, rather than the con artists at TalkTalk, who wont even acknowledge they are rationing customers connections...

That drop in speed might be the extra bandwidth saturating the network at some points, i.e. nothing intentional by TalkTalk. I don't know like but it's a possibility - and it would be too expensive to run networks capable of handling peak load for every customer simultaneously.

[Bagpuss]

That drop in speed might be the extra bandwidth saturating the network at some points, i.e. nothing intentional by TalkTalk. I don't know like but it's a possibility - and it would be too expensive to run networks capable of handling peak load for every customer simultaneously.

Well, whatever the reason, for 3mths a year i have a sub 2mbit connection...and TalkTalk seem to think thats acceptable,which is why November and a 50mbit service, cant come soon enough...i could go with TalkTalk's new fibre optic service and get 30mb, but i have ZERO faith that i wont suffer from the same problem..so they've lost me as a customer.

[watercooled]

BT infinity is also worth considering if you're FTTC enabled.

[crossy]

Are they saying the same to VM? They also regularly get bills wrong and seem to randomly increase prices for no reason - you have to constantly keep an eye on the bill and spend ages on the phone sorting it out. Ofcom seems to overlook VM a lot of the time...

That would depend on whether the customer concerned are complaining to Ofcom or not. If they're not then there's not really a heck of a lot that Ofcom could do - bitching on forums is not the same as making an official complaint. (yes, I know that this is common sense, but you'd be surprised the number of folks who think that forum bitching will get things sorted).

That said, is there any teleco who doesn't either mysteriously bump up prices or screw up billing? I've heard some real horror stories about BT - and tbh it was their price hiking that made us move to VM. Not that I'm saying that Vermin are any better - merely that they've not hacked us off yet.

The one that continually amuses me is Three - at the end of the billing period they always send me a text saying that I'm now out of credit and I need to contact them urgently. The first four times I phoned the helldesk, (and lord - was that productive ... not!), after that I took to ignoring the message with no apparent loss of service.

[watercooled]

Yeah I agree, but surely if enough people are complaining about TT, they must be for VM? There user base is much larger. Maybe it's not all that common, but it happens to us almost every other month.