I received an unsolicited telephone call from TalkTalk two or three months ago telling me that they were going to upgrade my connection to fibre free of charge and the call was just to advise me this would be happening.
About a month ago I received a new router from TalkTalk telling me I was to plug it in as it was replacing my old one and was an upgrade which would provide me with better reception et cetera. No mention of it being fibre optic exclusive.
Shortly after plugging in the router the signal on my broadband connection to my PC became unreliable as did all calls to and from my mobile phone using Wi-Fi through the router as well as the reception on my YouView box when trying to look at any of the iPlayers. It’s worth noting that both my PC and YouView boxes are hardwired to the router and therefore it was not a question of having to find a better location for the router to improve reception.
I have phoned TalkTalk several times during the course of the last two or three weeks complaining and was initially put through to the sales department rather than the technical department. During one conversation a young lady told me that my new router was designed for fibre-optic and therefore reception would be un-reliable until I was transferred over onto fibre-optic which she said was scheduled for the 3rd of March. So I thought I'd live with it until then but when my reception became virtually non-existent, I contacted them again and eventually got through to someone who told me that the previous girl was talking rubbish and that my reception shouldn’t be affected by the new router irrelevant of whether I'd been linked up with fibre-optic. After much twiddling of knobs at his end and yet more resetting of the router, the connection seemed to speed up considerably and I thought great.
Unfortunately the very next day it was back to its worst again and after more phone calls in the past week, I finally bumped into someone yesterday who said that the reason I was getting such bad reception was because I was on what’s known as a heritage package. I’ve no idea what that means but she said I would be best going onto the fibre optic package, which would NOT be free of charge. When I mentioned the free upgrade which was due to happen on the 3rd of March she said she had no record of that whatsoever. Almost as if I had made the entire story up. So as we speak I’ve got one part of TalkTalk telling me I’m being upgraded to fibre optic free of charge and the other part saying no I’m not. Equally I’ve got a new router which one part of TalkTalk says is not fibre-optic specific and the other part says it is.
I didn’t ask for this new router and the paperwork that arrived with it didn’t say I had to upgrade to fibre-optic. I wish to God I'd kept my old router as I would’ve just plugged it back in again and put the new router in the bin. I’ve put in a complaint yesterday lunchtime but have yet to hear anything, even though I was assured I would be contacted within 24 hours.
I can’t begin to tell you how frustrated I am and cannot get rid of the feeling of having been shafted.
Unless something is done I have every intention of going on every single review site I can possibly get on,( reception dependent of course) and letting everyone know my story. I'm also going to write to the Sunday Times consumer column as well as Which? magazine which I subscribe to.
Anyone else out there experiencing similar problems?
