Zyra ME //// Zyra's website //// Tiscali //// TalkTalk //// Tiscaliability //// Site Index

Talkali / Talk Talk Tiscali

Another FIASCO! Tiscali / Talkali / TalkTalk will have to do a lot of talking to talk their way out of this!

It was in December 2010, around the 16th, that I told the people at Tiscali about my plans and priorities. It's a little bit like moving house and telling the furniture removers that some items are fragile. Furniture removers generally have the good sense to believe you, rather than chucking the items to see if they smash.

In December 2010 here are the facts:

* I run a business which is a website, and having an Internet connection is important to it.

* I have done so well that I will soon be emigrating for tax purposes.

* The house will continue to be occupied and a good friend of mine will take on the customer account.

...

So, what do you think Tiscali / TalkTalk did?

They sent a letter, dated 17th December, with the wrong name on it even though they'd been told about that, titled "Cessation of Broadband services", and they said they would be cutting off the Internet connection on 30th December unless I phoned a special 5p/minute phone number.

I phoned that number and waited a considerable time listening to canned music. Eventually I got to talk to someone and I stated that I definitely did not want the broadband disconnecting. The person at TalkTalk said they would see to it and that it would NOT be disconnected.

However, a few days later, another problem letter arrived, dated 21st December, again with the wrong name on it even though they'd been told repeatedly about that, saying "We've received a request to transfer your service to another provider. We are treating this as notice to cancel your TalkTalk account. If you haven't asked or agreed to move to another supplier". The grammar was not good, but there was a phone number to call. This time is was an expensive 0871 number which are about 10p/minute, or more.

I phoned up and I found someone who promised me that the service would not be disconnected. They confirmed it would not be disconnected and that there would not be any break in the services.

On the night of the 23rd of December I was publishing the website. The website exists as a set of interlinked phases, and they are published in turn.

Suddenly, at about 2am on 24th December Xmas Eve, the Internet connection died. It had failed in the middle of the publishing of the website!

I stayed up all night publishing the last thousand files using a dial-up modem and various dial-up connections; an expensive and time-consuming task, made all the more annoying because of the unnecessariness of it. If Tiscali / TalkTalk had kept to their word, this would not have been required.

The publishing of Issue145 was complete at 07:30 on Xmas Eve and I went to bed as the sun was rising.

As it was now Xmas Eve and it was a Saturday, and as the next day was Xmas day, and after that it was a bank holiday, etc, the chance of getting to talk to anyone was not great. However, to their credit, there were people at work on Xmas Eve at Tiscali / TalkTalk and I spoke to those friendly people at The Retentions department.

The good news: They would compensate me with £30 of credit and restore the connection. The bad news: It would require that I sign up to a 12 month contract and sign over the line-rental to them. Well NO! That's not acceptable.

Incidentally, this also highlights Why you should have your Broadband with BT, because if you sign over the line rental to a company that behaves as badly as Tiscali / TalkTalk has done to me, you could be completely stuffed!

(Imagine if double glazing companies did this. Their reps could go around and throw a stone through your glass window and then say "Sorry! We'll give you a free window, provided you agree to have all of the windows in your house replaced and pay us for the whole contract etc").

To be fair to TalkTalk, at one point they did actually admit it was their fault, but at another point someone at TalkTalk claimed the thing that had happened was "slamming", which is where another company tries piratically to grab your account. However, when I asked "Which company did this?" they could not answer, and so the line on "slamming" was conveniently dropped.

After Xmas was over, I phoned Ofcom whose job it is to be a watchdog of telecommunications in the UK, as well as being expected to do all sorts of other things which they couldn't possibly do in a month of Sundays. The people at Ofcom were friendly, well meaning, and they tried to be helpful. Unfortunately, they had no power to do anything about bad practices of Tiscali or TalkTalk, or any other Phone Company. However, they did give me a complains e-mail address for Tiscali which was complaints@uk.tiscali.com . I wrote a message to Tiscali as follows:

Well, I might as well have wished them a Merry Christmas, because this is what I got back...

(A minor point about this: You are supposed to destroy the email before reading it. But how can you do that without reading the bit that says "without reading". Another point: I have it on reasonably good legal authority that such confidentiality clauses on emails have no legal basis. Also see legal contract clauses we don't agree to).

And then immediately afterwards, this...

However, on clicking on the link, regardless of whether it was 11 hours later or 2 minutes later by experiment, the result was the same...

Permission Denied The link that you used to access this page has expired. To request another password reset message, please visit Account Assistance.

What?! Well it wasn't 24 hours! ...or to put it another way, either it's a bug in the system at TalkTalk, or they are cowboys who won't allow any complaints even to the special address handed out by Ofcom! Well, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and suppose that there's a bug in the system and for some odd reason the link expires instantly so you can't respond, then what? Well let's try the "contact us" form system.

Same message, pasted into the "Contact Us" form, which by the way has some annoying things about it. For one thing, it wants to know your date of birth, and for another it assumes you have a first-name last-name rather than a single name. Paranoia suggests the system is either badly designed or is a method to fish more information out of you. However, again we'll give them the benefit of the trout and see what happens.

...

Update: This is just the beginning of the stuff. There's loads more to write up. Either it will have a happy ending or it won't. However, you'll be able to see it on here. TalkTalk have cut off broadband for no apparent reason. Now let's see if they can explain!

Meanwhile, Ofcom have ruled that customers of Tiscali / TalkTalk shall be compensated. "Ofcom’s investigation into TalkTalk and Tiscali UK has resulted in almost £2.5 million in refunds and good will payments after thousands of consumers were incorrectly billed for cancelled services". More about this here: http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/2011/02/compensation-for-talktalk-and-tiscali-uk-customers/

Unfortunately, I have, as of yet, not been compensated. I would guess the Ombudsman Otelo is very busy. However it's July, and the problem has been outstanding since Xmas. TalkTalk Tiscali have so far got away with it, including not paying any compensation, and not even paying me back the money which they owe. I fear they may just go bust and then start again, as many disreputable companies have done, and then we the honest people, customers and creditors, will be left with nothing. Fortunately, we live in the Internet Age when malpractising companies do not get away with it because folk write about their experiences to warn new customers to beware! See what bad press Tiscali and TalkTalk get here now. It would have been considerably cheaper if they had been fair to the affiliate in the first place.

Update: As of November 2011, still no compensation. The Ombudsman Otelo proved to be a washout. The Ombudsman's decision was that TalkTalk/Tiscali shall only pay the money they owe and not even the derisory amount that had offered. I can see why Tiscali/TalkTalk have chosen Otelo as their representative, as customers quite likely often fare badly. In my opinion Otelo is an excuse of an Ombudsman, and has failed to do their duty to see fair play in the matter of misbehaving companies.

To put the decision of Otelo in perspective with an analogy, supposing Otelo were the Ombudsman of supermarkets, and you bought a packet of breakfast cereals from a supermarket and when you'd eaten half of the cereals you found a rotting dead rat in the box, Otelo would order that the supermarket pay you the price of half a packet of cereals. This is the type of service that you get.

Therefore, in absence of any proper justice (such as Tiscali/TalkTalk paying, say, £900 as a gesture of goodwill for the nuisance and trouble caused), I call for the winding-up and bankruptcy of Tiscali/TalkTalk, and I urge customers to leave them and move to other places.

Since the recent publishing of this Issue of the site, TalkTalk/Tiscali customers have found that the Internet is being restricted, censored, and that many websites do not appear. This means, in effect, that if your Internet service provider is TalkTalk, there are a great many websites that you can not see, whereas your friends who have BT Broadband CAN see those websites.

This page also highlights the importance of having BT as your phone line provider, as explained in this BT Broadband Recommendation

2011/11/10: I believe that the Internet would be improved by the bankruptcy and winding-up of Tiscali/TalkTalk. Let's hope that happens soon!

I can also see why Tiscali/TalkTalk has Otelo as their Ombudsman. Otelo seem to be a pet ombudsman which supports the wrongdoers such as Tiscali/TalkTalk whatever. It's like something from the bad old days before the Internet. Unfortunately for Tiscali/TalkTalk and for Otelo, some of us have websites and we can tell the world about these things so folk can be warned to avoid such problems.

In case you're interested, as of February 2012, over a year after the problem and many months after the judgement of the Ombudsman, Tiscali / TalkTalk haven't even refunded the money which they owe me, money which is an account credit.

Justice will be served if you read my pages and learn by my mistake. Avoid Tiscali TalkTalk!