 |  | By Julia Kukiewicz Staff Writer Friday, 21 December 2007 |
THE long wait is over for thousands of TalkTalk customers who signed up for the troubled ISP’s ‘free’ broadband package eighteen months ago.
Will TalkTalk’s broadband customers be running for the hills? Or has the company’s reportedly poor service changed enough to persuade them to stay?
TalkTalk has been dogged by reports of appalling service ever since Carphone Warehouse launched the deal. Consumers have reported problems with almost every aspect of the broadband: from the installation and billing to the customer support.
Free broadband
This, of course, after the Advertising Standards Agency banned the company from calling the deal ‘free’. In actual fact it included a £29.99 connection fee and signing up to the Talk3 International telephone tariff at £20.99 a month. Not quite so free then.
To add insult to injury some customers report finding it near impossible to leave their eighteen-month contracts early (even after TalkTalk announced in September that they would be able to) and were often told that they would have to pay for time when they had no service as well as a £70 termination fee.
Improved service
On the flip side, it is not true to say that all customers have reported bad service.
Many remain pleased with TalkTalk broadband, especially when they haven’t experienced any problems with their connection.
In addition some customers have been persuaded to stay. It is true to say that TalkTalk’s customer service has improved markedly in the past eighteen months – they’ve won awards for it – and while not all customers report tip-top service this is a familiar trade-off in the world of budget broadband.
Despite all this many customers are expected to run into the similarly-priced, but significantly faster arms of Virgin Media or O2 Broadband or opt for a service with an excellent customer service record such as Zen or Plusnet.
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