TalkTalk broadband
Posted 10 January 2007, 16:07. (Filed under: Common-sense by Andrew)
Signing up for broadband can be a daunting experience, and I apologise now if you’re reading this for enlightenment and clarification – you probably won’t find it here.
When I chose a provider, I considered a number of things:
What technology can I use?
Can I get cable? Am I in an NTL/Telewest area? When we were in Nailsea, near Bristol, we got a cracking deal from Telewest giving us a basic cable TV package and 4MB broadband for £15 a month. Now they do a three-for-thirty deal, which I’m not so sure is good value, but I guess it depends on you.
In Dunfermline, NTL/Telewest haven’t been given permission to lay their cables, so we can’t get cable services. I’m going to suggest that this might have something to do with the huge number of jobs Sky provide in the area, but I could be completely wrong, and have no shred of evidence to back up my hunch.
Who can I get ADSL from?
By the phone companies’ standards, we’re very light users in terms of voice calls, so the game for me is to reduce our monthly subscriptions to a minimum. This goes for landlines and also for mobiles. This rules out “free” broadband for people with expensive subscriptions from the likes of Orange or Sky.
BT would happily give us broadband, and charge us handsomely for the privilege. They seem to think that Broadband is not just a dumb pipe into your home, but a great tool to enable you to get security, movie downloads, music on demand and all sorts of other services that I know I can get without paying BT a penny.
That leaves TalkTalk.
Local Loop Unbundling? What the…?
TalkTalk can provide you with broadband in one of two ways.
# The less interesting way is the same as all the other providers: Keep your line with BT for calls (BT Option 1 currently costs £10.75). Pay TalkTalk for their Talk3 package (£8.99) and let TalkTalk do your broadband for £10. Total cost: £29.74 per month.
# The more interesting way is to give everything (Line rental, calls and broadband) to TalkTalk, in which case the total cost is a much smaller £19.99 per month.
We said “Yes” to the man from TalkTalk in October, and were connected without any technical hitches in November. By “no technical hitches,” I mean we had no extended telephone disconnection. TalkTalk had sent us our username and password some days before the go-live date, so I was able to put this information into our modem and get the service up and running.
Hardware
I haven’t mentioned that TalkTalk advise you to buy your modem from them (£30) and install it with some kind of start-up-pack CD-ROM. I decided early on that I wanted a hardware router in my modem for more reliable protection from the wild, wild Internet, so I purchased a modem separately. The start-up-pack from TalkTalk has never arrived, and if it’s anything like the one NTL/Telewest gave me last time we did broadband, it wouldn’t work anyway.
My modem configured itself automatically, and I was online moments after I typed in my username and password in the ADSL setup bit of the modem admin.
Conclusion
Apart from the very occasional dropped line, our service has been flawless. I’ve been very fortunate in never needing to contact TalkTalk customer service. Crunch-time will be when we move house, and I have to transfer my contract to a new phone-line. Until then, I’m happy.
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