I'm posting in here in an attempt to get an actual response to approximately 3 hours worth of calls over the last few days.
The full-fibre backed internet solution at my dad's place (I pay the internet bills there as it's mostly me that uses it) has been experiencing substantial dropouts over the last two months.
I had called in early February to attempt to get these issues fixed, and after several phone calls to TalkTalk agents on or around the 29th of February, I managed to speak to a member of staff whilst the dropouts happened.
After various tests, the member of staff indicated that they could see that there was an issue with the line, and requested an engineer to go to my dad's address (whilst I was present) for the engineer free of charge (unless appointment was cancelled or voided) to test the lines.
When the engineer arrived, he found no faults however I presented him with ICMP logs and he made notes that TalkTalk were to provide a new router free of charge. The engineer noted that the router that is currently installed was a TalkTalk provided router that was primarily for ADSL as opposed to full-fibre.
This new router has not appeared.
I have enquired about this and the result was that whilst the engineer has reported that a new router should be dispatched in order to further troubleshoot the issue, no router would be provided by TalkTalk unless I (to paraphrase here) cough up money either by paying for a new router or upgrade my services, both of which are unacceptable solutions.
This is further compounded by TalkTalk's latest bill showing a charge for an engineer's visit of £75.
I have spent 1.5 hours today attempting to get this urgent billing issue resolved however no one I have spoken to appears to have the authority to deal with it.
Whilst I already have a booked call with complaints representatives for later on this week, since there is only 1 day between the booked call and the date when the Direct Debit is collected, I hereby give notice that I will exercise my right under the Direct Debit guarantee to claim back any wrongful charges.
So, how do I fix this situation? How do I get this new router sent to my dad's house, and how do I not get charged £75 for an engineers' visit I was told was free?
I look forward to everyone's thoughts regarding this matter.
PS: find attached ICMP logs, one from the 27th of Feb and the others continuously polling the connection up until today. Note pings well in excess of 1 second.
@Arne-TalkTalk wrote:As you have an open complaint we cant interfere with this.
That's understandable, thank you. In that case, I'll elect to keep this thread open, and use this as a method to publicly collate evidences that I've gathered over the past few weeks on behalf of my dad.
Also Just to confirm the Wifi Hub is compatible with Full Fibre, not sure why the engineer advised your differently.
That's even more hilarious, and was exactly what I personally thought prior to the engineer's visit, thank you for that.
I had got some pings early this morning indicating that the internet had also gone down again. First time since the morning of the 15th.
In case anyone is wondering how I'm monitoring the connection:
I have turned on ICMP replies within the router's firmware and through convoluted magic, I have set up dynamic DNS on the router. It's unfortunate that I'm not able to point directly to a PowerDNS authoritative nameserver that is under my control, but such is life and ultimately what I've done is somehow working.
One of my monitoring servers pings the address magically associated with the dynamic IP every 20 seconds, and response time is logged.
If the ping fails for the first time, 9 further attempts are made. If it's failed after the 10th ping, then it's logged in my monitoring systems as a failure.
There was a 300 second TTL on the A record (it's now 60 seconds, which is the lowest that my chosen third party Dynamic DNS service allows) so there was a possibility where when the IP lease had expired, there would be a maximum period of up to 5 minutes where pings would fail to be resolved. However I haven't seen this behaviour yet.
What I have seen however, is reporting indicate that the router has been unreachable for between 10 and 30 minutes when new IPs are issued, so I really don't know what's going on.
Staff
