@Rob: FYI, AOL sold all UK operations to Opal Telecom some years ago. Opal/CPW/TalkTalk setup a “AOL Europe” in Lichenstein to obscure this. but when you check the connectivity of AOL users they’re always assigned IP addresses in the same ranges as TalkTalk cdomestic users.

As all my problems with them seem to boil down to bad line cards and/or poor copper loop (latest diagnosis is “water in cable joints”, which as a former telco engineer(*) I know is a major problem on old infrastructure) – neither of which will improve if I switch ISP.

I’m waiting for FTTC to be rolled out on the basis that if that doesn’t fix the issue then it’s time ot jump ship entirely and try Virgin, etc (but I hear as many bad stories about them as any other ISP and the fact that they’ve had 72 hours downtime on my prime employer’s 1Gb/s circuit in the last week doesn’t make me confident in them.)

(*) “Engineer” = with a degree. Not a white-van driving cable monkey.

Every single time I have lost Internet it has been due to an external problem with their lines, or BT lines, and every single time I have called the blame has been put on to me. Get a new router, a new filter, a new computer, a new house etc. etc. Once there was a fire at the local telephone exchange, they did not know about it. I saw a BT Open Reach engineer in the village one day and started chatting to him. He mentioned that sometimes ISPs “fiddle” with the settings to see if they can improve performance without updating hardware, and this sometimes causes more problems!

Maybe they are all just as bad. Although in the 5 or so years I was with Freedom2Surf I had no problems, and was assured when I transferred over that the service would be the same, if not better! Happy days.

Touch wood … not had any problems for a while.

Your Opal / TalkTalk Business Broadband ‘service’ is likely to be down for several hours, perhaps as long as 5 hours.

TalkTalk’s dreaded and dreadful disconnections always start at 00:15 hours

Best regards,

Paul.

Also Paul, that is not the first time someone has said that they were told they should have a 2nd backup line.

I have now sent 2 messages to Talk Talk customer services, and they have ignored both. I will probably have to get legal advice before the year is out about cancelling my contract, or at least going elsewhere when, and if, it ever expires.

At the beginning of this week at about the now familiar time of 00:15, down went the Internet whilst, on the Thomson 585 router, the ADSL LED continued to glow brightly green.

I rang Technical Support. The man claimed there was no work in my area. Talk Talk was completely ‘innocent’ he claimed. He could not explain why the ADSL LED was on and the Internet LED off.

It was was my fault the TalkTalk man said. If I was doing “mission critical work” I should have gotten another telephone line and a second Internet subscription from a different ISP.

Broadband is never a continuous service he repeatedly declared before repeating his “mission critical work” assertion with a strong emphasise on me, the customer, being to blame for the TalkTalk network being down.

At times like these it is difficult to argue with such a dogmatic person. He gave me a 7 digit reference number. Two hours later it was still down so I went to bed cursing TalkTalk because all the phones, except one, were also down (VOIP/SIP).

About 3 days later TalkTalk called me back quoting the 7 digit reference number. I wonder what the problem was, I thought, as I dialled 0800-298 2981.

TalkTalk, Opal’s, 0800 number was not very responsive. Despite being told to press 2, the system refused to accept any DTMF input (tones) until it had laborious announced all the available long-winded options. Obviously TalkTalk was living up to its name, TalkTalking its callers to sleep.

The TalkTalk Business Broadband technical support was …. em ….. em …..er …. “different”.

The man said TalkTalk had carried out a thorough investigation and had decided it was my fault for turning-off my router when I pack-up for the night.

I explained that when the TalkTalk service stopped (Internet LED off; ADSL LED on) my router had actually been ON – powered by electricity – otherwise none of the LEDs would have illuminated.

He could not answer that. Instead he said TalkTalk were certain the outage had been caused by me turning-off my router every night.

TalkTalk’s technical support could not understand that when I am using my Internet connected computer (a solid and very reliable Linux system) everything is on.

Only when I finish for the night do I power-down everything.

Golly, why do TalkTalk employ computer morons? So the directors can make a bigger profit because genuinely competent people cost more than the minimum wage?

I’m waiting for TTFC – BT’s Fibre to the Cabinet – to arrive in July then switching.

In the meantime I now have unlimited broadband on 3, plus 7,000 minutes a month all for £25. My broadband dongle plugs into my small portable hub (Ebay about £20) and the wifi and ethernet cable can connect to my internal network. Just have to discover how to alter the default gateway on my network away from TalkTalk, when it breaks down, to use the 3 alternative.

Best regards,

Paul.

An email server sent-out, presumably, an email to alert the Opal Talk Talk (OTT) subscriber to a new monthly invoice.

The OTT mail server was operating on IP address 213.246.179.50. That IP address has a DNS A record named emailfilter2.opalbilling.co.uk – so what, you think, it looks normal.

When the TTO mail server contacted one of my mail servers to deliver the Opal email, the Opal service announced its identity as “mail.vartec.co.uk”.

My mail server, keen to avoid junk, spam and all the other crap, did a look-up (using the Linux Bind command ‘host’) of “mail.vartec.co.uk” and got an authoritative answer that the IP address of “mail.vartec.co.uk” was 217.68.129.200.

My mail server, Exim from Cambridge University, is clever enough to know that IP address 213.246.179.50 is definitely not the same as IP address 217.68.129.200, so very politely my mail server refused to accept the suspicious email. My mail server even pointed-out the error to OTT but will OTT ever read their rejection logs? Probably they don’t know what an error log looks like.

Subsequently enquiries reveal Vartec.co.uk is registered to:-

Vartec Telecom Europe Ltd
(Company number: 3565511)
1st Floor Belgrave House
No.1 Greyfriars
Northampton
Northamptonshire
NN1 2TT
United Kingdom

and that IP address 217.68.129.200 is registered to

VarTec Telecom UK Limited
Regent House
2 Muirfield Crescent
London
E14 9SZ
+44 207 001 9084

Once again Opal Talk Talk or, more accurately, Car Phone Warehouse’s off-shoot OTT, confirms it has not got a clue how to run anything to do with the Internet.

Regards,

Paul.

He brought this up while he was there (all of one week!) and they said they took the view if it isn’t broken we don’t touch it.
He was also taksed to do some cabling tracing, and when he asked his talk talk counterparts where each port led no-one onsite seemed to know!

Anyway, Darrell, I sympathise with you greatly, as I run a similar business. If i were you i’d spend your time looking at their terms and finding a way to end their contract without getting stung!

I spent some time looking for companies that dont traffic shape/manage and that are still independants and now use Zen, they are a little pricey and have usage Caps, but because of the downturn i think reduced cost and free broadband providers are all going to start faultering somewhere along the line because there just isnt the revenue to support the service as well as provide it! (and in some cases even provide it!!)

Just thought I would share my experience regarding Opal which has now recently changed back to Talk Talk business.

I too am a web designer who currently employs 7 staff and totally rely on our “business” broadband service. I woke up on Friday morning with my usual routine reaching for my Iphone and checking my emails only to find that unusually I had not received and through the night. Anyway as I had to travel quite a way for a meeting I went straight from home instead of going to the office first.

I received a call from one of my designers saying that our broadband was not working which explained why I was without mail as we run an Exchange server in our offices. I asked my colleague to call Talk Talk Business and report the fault. He did just that and after waiting for around 20 mins on the phone got through to support who initially said everything checked out fine on the line test and that it must be a fault with our equipment. Fair enough we also do IT services so have spare routers on the shelf so proceeded to replace the equipment only to find that we still had the issue which was showing the error username and password rejected by your ISP provider. After many calls to Talk Talk support and my entire team sitting with nothing to do we were told that there may be a fault on the exchange. By this time it was after lunch and now work had been done in the office and we had the embarassing situation where we had to explain to our customers that we were unable to provide support to them as we had no email, FTP access and could not even access web pages. Whats more our IT engineer was unable to access the server by VPN and thus unable to download the files required to complete an installation he was working on.

I spoke to my colleague again and asked him to push for time when the service was resumed and what we should do regarding compensation for loss of business. Immediately the tone changed from their support person saying that Talk Talks terms regaring outages are purely to cover loss of service and that they are not responsible for loss of business. The person then added “I’m not been funny but if you are a web design company and you rely that much on your broadband service the don’t you think you should have a second line to fall back on if one fails”

I immediately called them as I was now fuming and concerned about the impact this was having on our business. After the usual wait to get through I spoke to another support guy and explained my concerns. I explained what the previous support person had said and that I thought his comments were ridiculous and that the fact that if I rely on my car for my business which I do then should I buy another one and have it sitting beside it on the off chance that 1 might not start in the morning? His response was that the previous support person should not have made the comments and that sometimes they can be tackless. We then proceeded to change passwords and the usual tests we had done previously only to be told that there was probably still a fault at the exchange. We were told we would be updated by text if the fault was rectified. I explained that I needed to know roughly when it would likely to be on as we would have to work the weekend to make up the lost time. This again would cost my business as overtime would then bneed to be paid.

Saturday morning; no emails means no connection in the office. I called tham again and got through to another support guy who checked the status and said there had not been any updates as yet. I then did my own research and checked the BT exchange status for our exchange which had all green ticks stating that there were no current issues. I called Talk Talk again and got the same guy this time who said there was no updates. I explained my findings that there were no issues reported on our exchange and to add to the mystery another business that shares the same offices gets their broadband from the same exchange and their connection was fine. I then started suspecting that maybe I was not been told the truth. I asked if I could have the contact number for their bt centre so I could speak to an engineer. Tone changed again and I was told that they would not speak to me as I was not a BT customer and that my contact was with Talk Talk and their contact was with BT. I then said that basically if if had an outage again I would be better having BT as a provider as I could speak to them directly and perhaps get the issue solved quicker. I said I was not happy and that I was considering changing to BT as I could not rely on their service (happened many times with 1 outage lasting over a month and nearly costed me my business

Tone changed again and I was then getting a default response read from a hymn sheet that they did have up to 7 days to resolve any issues causing broadband outage. OUCH! this would definately cause unrepairable damage to our business reputation.

So there you go; I’m still sitting here with no VPN to the office; no emails and basically out of business until the service that I am paying for is resumed.

And yes we are looking to move providers and will make sure we steer clear of anything related to Talk Talk including Opal, Pipex, Tiscali or whatever they decide to call themselves.

Oh and by the way I WILL make sure I let every business I know what they are likely to expect when dealing with such a company especially if your business depends on it.

This is the first post of many as I have lots of time on my hands at the moment

The first outage that I experience was on the day I was due to start a new contract (the only contract I had actually) which required constant connection, very embarrassing for a new business trying to win some work.

Also I still do not understand that strange terms for cancellation. Seems I have to pay £300 in the first 2 years, but even after that they can still keep up held in? Baffled about that. Waiting for a reply from customer services at the moment, I simply asked when my contract expires and what are the terms for cancelling sooner, and asked for confirmation that when the “2 year contract” is up the service will cease. No response.

Since 1st February 2011 my service is operating under the ‘Talk Talk Business’ brand but I would never ever run a business like they do.

About 3 weeks ago, at about 17:10 on a weekday the Internet went down but ADSL remained active. The fault lasted for 6 hours. It affected Opal/Talk Talk who were unable to log-in to their customer database hosted by IBM (in Scotland?).

I could access some sites but not others. For example I could reach a web site but not another just 1 digit different. I think there was a Opal problem with a router dropping some bits.

No one at Opal had a clue. The ‘support’ claimed the ‘expert support’ (apparently that is another department) has not responded to their internal emails for several hours.

It seemed to me that Opal was being run by a bunch of inexperienced kids who lacked any genuine technical skills. Being a very experienced expert in dealing with this type of failure I had to wait hour after hour while people who didn’t have a clue about computer systems and just didn’t know what to do – neither to determine the point of failure nor to measure the scope of that failure.

The Talk Talk press office (young dolly birds speaking with refined accents) were not bothered and no comment was ever forthcoming for publication.

The Talk Talk switchboard was manned by a bloke from a sub-contractor who wasn’t connecting calls to anyone who didn’t know the name of the person they wanted to speak too. Because of the Internet failure I couldn’t log-on to Companies House web site and download for £1 the names of the directors.

The next day ‘support’ knew NOTHING about the previous evenings 6 hour long breakdown.

Opal Talk Talk Business seems a disorganised mess.

To add insult to injury, I was updating files on a remote server at about 00:15 when the Internet went down again. I complained to ‘support’ who told me there was major changes to the core network. When I asked why Opal Talk Talk Business (OTT) did not email its customers notifying then of the planned 5 hour long cut in a 24 hours a day service, I was told it was NOT company policy.

After recovering from that ghastly event I was happily working on a server problem, whilst listening to soothing Beethoven and thinking I should have fixed this in just another few minutes. I was feeling good and was pleased I had quickly identified the problem and my solution would fix everything.

DOWN goes the Opal Talk Talk Business continuous Internet service available non-stop 24 hours a day. Really angry I rang ‘support’ and eventually got directed, without any intervention from me, to the Meridian Voice Mail System which asked me to enter a voice mail box.

Not impressed by the OTT service, I redialled support again and after about 17 minutes got the Meridian Voice Mail Service again. I still didn’t know the voice mail box number so I swore several times. My blood pressure went up and being tenacious I tried to call support again.

Third time lucky. I eventually got through to support only to be told there was another 5 to 6 hour black out because of ‘massive work on the core network’.

I abandoned the server problem and when to bed.

BT are installing fibre to premises (FTTP) and fibre to local green cabinets (FTTC). In my area the go-live date is July 2011. My present speeds are 600 up and 2400 down. BT’s fibre is offering for about another £10 a month 6800 up and something very impress … down.

I can not tell you what that speed is because I can’t reach the BT Fusion line tester site. OTT has cut-off my ******* Internet again. Its 00:30 and I have subscribed on the Nildram web site to ALL the relevant notifications but NEVER received any notification. They are really ******* *****. Please excuse my anger and annoyance.

I am willing testify as a witness that OTT are crap; have absolutely no concern for their customers and offer a sub-standard service.

Support – thankfully my phone service is NOT run by OTT – don’t know what the problem is.
My Thomson 585v7 has 4 greens, including one marked Broadband, and 1 red/unlit LED marked Internet. Support seem helpful. I guess they know how absolutely delighted I am with the latest ’5 star’ service from OTT.

20 minutes later and the service is back. Support said there was ‘an outage window of 20 minutes for network testing’. Despite being on the mailing list for notifications I received no emails.

I’m waiting, increasingly desperately, for BT’s fibre to arrive. All I need is one or two static IPs and a 24 hours a day service. Is that too much to ask when in Holland the speeds are super fast and costs reasonable ???

Paul.

I beleive this has already happened, infact, as the ombudsman, who have 10 weeks to redress a complaint or appeal have now sent two letters saying they are sorry that it is taking so long, it makes me think they are so bogged down with complaints and the legalities of it all that it will be months if not years until I now get a decision.

It seems that whenever there is an Internet problem the first suggestion is for the customer to buy new hardware in the hope that it fixes it. I am already £40 out of pocket, and almost spent more last week on new filters.

Starting to reconsider this as an option. Maybe those Sky packages are the way to go…. or BT.