We’ve been with Talktalk for our home internet connection since 2002 (when the service was under the Tiscali umbrella). We’ve had the odd service outage and hiccup over the years but things have always been put right within a couple of days of contacting the support team.
We’re on the TalkTalk ADSL broadband service but have been without an internet connection since Sunday 20th March. On this occasion seem to be going round and round in circles with the web chat support or when telephoning the overseas support team.
I’m not confident what, if anything, is being done to fix the problem so wondered if anybody can offer any advice or help on next steps.
Here’s the story so far.
Monday 21st March
Having performed all the troubleshooting advice from the website (including powering down the router, trying a replacement/different router, swapping out microfilters, swapping out cables between the microfilter and router, bypassing the internal house phone wiring and plugging router into the test socket behind the faceplate of the BT master socket) I started a web chat using my mobile phone internet connection since the telephone support service was unavailable in the evening.
Web chat agent insists we go through all the previous troubleshooting tests whilst performing line test checks in the background. Wanted to know what type of TalkTalk router we were using but we’ve never had a router supplied to us by TalkTalk because 20 years ago when we first signed up for the broadband service with Tiscali you had to supply your own router and hardware.
Web chat goes on for a good few hours during which time the agent focuses on the fact that since we’re out of contract and on the older ADSL service then he could sign us up to a new contract on the latest fibre broadband service which would mean we would no longer have the problems we were experiencing with the old ADSL broadband service. I explained that we really needed to get the existing internet connection up and running before we started to think about moving onto a new contract and the latest fibre service.
Finally after going through all the troubleshooting checks and numerous line tests being run by the web chat agent we get confirmation that the agent thinks there is indeed a fault (outside the house) which will need an BT Openreach engineer to fix.
Great we’ve got the fix on the go so we should be back up and running later in the week… or so I thought.
Friday 25th March
Still no internet as I leave for work in the morning. So once at work login to my TalkTalk account to track the fault progress. Then receive a text from TalkTalk to say that “We’ve tested your broadband line and it looks like its working as it should be but if you are still experiencing issues to visit the service centre”.
Decide to telephone the support team because they’re now open to take calls. Support agent informs me that the web chat agent from the Monday evening had not arranged for an engineer to fix the problem and that whilst they can see details of the web chat and confirmation of the fault they cannot progress the fix (which needs an engineer callout) without going through all the troubleshooting steps again. You need to switch the router off and on… can’t do this because I’m not at home…. but we’ve already done all of this on the Monday evening when the fault was confirmed….. no cannot do anything to arrange the engineer without going through all the tests.... yes the line checks we’ve done this morning show there is a fault but we cannot progress to arranging the engineer until we have done through all the troubleshooting checks... we can call you at home on Monday to do this.... but I'm at work during the week and we've already gone through all the troubleshooting steps numerous times so we know it's not an internal issue at the property.
After an hour of conversation and getting nowhere ask to have the call escalated and finally transferred to one of the managers. Explained the previous events from the webchat on the Monday evening and the fact that we've confirmed that this is an external issue with the Broadband service rather than an internal problem caused by something within the house so can the manager arrange for fault to be raised with BT Openreach so the issue which is probably at the exchange gets sorted.
Manager is running the line tests and says that we can see that there is a fault but "we can't tell exactly where the problem is located from the line tests that we're doing".
Manager says they'll arrange a TalkTalk Cube engineer to visit the house on Saturday morning (26th March) between 08:00 and 13:00. Brilliant I think... the light is on at the end of the tunnel.
Then early afternoon on Friday get a phonecall from the same manager saying that the engineer visit has now been cancelled since the appointment that had been made was no longer available. So what happens now I ask.... an engineer will need to fix the problem which is probably at the local exchange... when will that be.... not sure.... possibly at some point next week.
Then after this phonecall on Friday received a text message saying "We're just checking in after your recent engineer visit and think you may still be experiencing problems with your service. If that's the case we'd like you to check you in home setup".
I suppose what I'm trying to find out is if a fault has definitely been raised with BT Openreach to fix the issue probably at the local exchange which has killed the internet connection?
Any help or suggestions gratefully received.
Neil
Neil
