- hell, that's dreadful - poor fellow. (Likewise 'cloaked');)

This is obviously very difficult.

I shall remain at home with my ZX80 and play ping-pong.

Well, yes, but if you look at it correctly, the Boingo is just an additional perk on top of what you really get out of Amex (e.g decent family travel insurance with the same spec as Amex alone will probably end up costing you more than £450 p.a.).

But if you don't travel much then obviously Amex isn't for you since most of the benefits are orientated towards the regular traveller.

Well I am one of those people that allow others to share my broadband. For that I can travel the country and tap into 4 million hotspots. It seems fair to me as my home broadband isn't affected if someone did tap into it as my network stays secure.

Because of those hot spots I would not even consider using another provider.

I live in an area with low density housing. I'm content to let BT have back a little bit of my 40+ speed and unlimited BB access. If I lived in Central London, I would have to think again...............

The only reason I would do that broadband sharing thing, is that it's an excellent alibi if you are doing dodgy stuff with your connection :E

I am STILL waiting to have email restored. 13 days tomorrow and I have spoken to different people in India and they all say the same. It will be fixed in the next 14hours. They are in breach of contract now - so time to act. And there are others still complaining.

PPRuNE Pop, why don't you inform Ofcom. They usually listen and act pretty quickly if there is a strong case as yours is. If you've logged all your calls then you can quote them. Failing that report to BBC's Watchdog. Thousands of others will be doing the same.

'crewmeal' - a good idea. I will give them another call and tell them what I am about to do. In the meantime I got engaged to Gmail, which at least gives me a service, albeit limited, but its helps. Not sure I want to marry them tho!

Having been with Virgin.net for over a decade, I was appalled to learn through word of mouth that they are ending ADSL support and transferring it....to the infernal TalkTalk :mad: !!

But at least there's Virgin cable here now, so I guess there'll be a faff whilst I arrange for installation and account transfer. But what an utterly stupid time of year to disrupt loyal customers in this way - particularly since Virgin hasn't actually bothered to contact its customers to inform them of this change.

You have to hand it to TalkTalk they CAN talkthetalk. I have just spent 1:20 on the phone and spoke to a manager there - he was in the Philippines. Out of range of the typhoon now! He was charming but still difficult to understand at times.


Anyway, he changed some of MY settings from his desk and I think I am more or less OK. It turns out one of my addy's is still down. But then the batteries in phone went phut! In short I now have 4 primary addresses working with a password they devised but easy to remember but I haven't actually finished the 'job' because I will have to use the new password in purchases etc., He admitted this was a major happening in TalkTalk and he is going to investigate some compensation for me - but I am not holding my breath. What 13 days without email is worth must be something................!


The essence of the problem appears to be with BT but how it happened in the first place I don't know. It seems that they are as bad as each other and can't run a reliable service. Well, that's my thinking anyhow.

Rule 1. Always try to blame another company

OK! Well answer still counts!!

I have now just spoken to a manager in India. I am getting about the South East Asia area - I wish. TalkTalk have now admitted that they have a server down and - more or less to the south east of London - where I live. It has been down for two thirds of the past two weeks. I have got a 'promise' if you can call it that. That I will be called as soon as the server is up again. I will be checking anyway.

I also got a promise that I will be offered compensation as soon as I am server satisfied. Now I have to work out what that should be. Anyone have examples of it?

Anyway I have been using webmail and gmail The former on ONE of my addresses only and the latter on three of my addresses. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing if I should have received from either. A new problem is that my android tinkles its bell to let me know I have mail - but there isn't any!

Good fun it is not.

Don't hold your breath regarding compensation in the form of cash or M&S vouchers, as they have probably never heard of M&S in S. E. Asia. You're more lightly to get some rental discount for a period that you can negotiate.

At the first opportunity I would drop Talk Talk and move on to a supplier that is more competent. I use Plusnet fibre optic and not had a single problem in 18 months. (Yes I know it's part of BT.) Again this is down to choice and what's available in your area.

crewmeal


How many times I have thought those thoughts?? I'd love to do it but I only have the brass wire! No fibre optics, no cable. The annoying thing is that until TT started to get cash greedy and joined forces with Virgin, Sky and the Lord knows who, they were NOT ready to undertake the ambitions of Charlie Dunston - THEN or NOW! They ask for surveys to get the gripes that are legion in their particular part of the industry only to confirm what we already know. I do think that it time TT will sink. However, this is now and they are freely telling everyone they had server issues and they are now resolved - not mine it ain't! In the interim I am trying gmail but it is not worth the effort really. TT have promised in their finest Urdu language that they will contact me tomorrow - yeah well we'll see.


Its good to talk! PlusNet was good and hopefully still is but even that is part of the TT network and has been for some time.

All I can suggest is keep trying to see when fibre optic will be available in your area.

Where and when - Superfast Fibre Broadband

Meanwhile it be worth while cutting your losses and maybe try an icloud email?

We are getting mail servers and broadband services awfully tied up here. PPP's problems are, as far as I can see, with email. Whether he is on ADSL or Fibre makes little difference. PPP - 80Mb down and 20 up are supposed to be available right now at your house. You only have to ask (and pay!). Still, with a crook email server, staying with TT and moving to fibre wil probably do NOTHING for your email issues. Change provider and set up a different email service.

Spent ~40 years shackled to GPO /Post office telephones /BT

Meanwhile, broadband had arrived and ZEN provided many years of first-class service. I also finally overcame inertia and moved line-rental to PostOffice-primarily because weekend calls to mobiles were free.
By this time,my basic ZEN connection was ~£14 a month...add the same again for P.O.----add calls~£8 a month......so, not far removed from £9 a week for comms.

Withdrawal of the "free to mobiles" facility gave me a prod.....The "moneysaving expert" site showed aPLUSNET deal that meant paying a year's rental up front, plus a Direct debit mandate for calls (package of unlimited landline calls is $5/month ...100 minutes/monthtomobiles = another fiver......a £50 cashback would reduce the total broadband and line package to under £12 a month.
Well, i took the plunge, including a fiver postage fora new router....rebate cheque arrived afew weeks later It's quick,it all works, the automated call -billing is around £14 a month (Probably 'cos I go over the 60 -minute call-limit)

So, for this happy bunny, Plusnet is all good....I delight in telling BT that they abused their monopoly for 30+ years and now is payback time!

If you play games/ stream video and similar, I'd recommend ZEN.
For light users like me, the Plusnet package was unbeatable....market is very fluid and best deals vary ,week to week but they never include BT or TT.

Errmm...... yes....well, Plusnet is an example of BT continuing to have their fingers in all the pies ....

Plusnet is owned by BT Retail
Plusnet resells BT Wholesale products

So you've quite securely shackled yourself back up to the BT empire I'm afraid !

The industry is blighted by the likes of TalkTalk to get as rich as they can as fast as they can. Charles Dunston, who 'invented' Carphone Wharehouse is now a millionaire several times over. He like many others 'uses' the cheap labour everywhere in South East Asia but to keep us 'moaners and groaners' in check he got us involved to tell him what we most hated. It didn't matter one iota what we said either way the customer base grows and grows and we have to live with it.

Just today Ofcom announced that for the first time BT are the worst broadband providers. What does mean? Nothing! TalkTalk are third and that amounts to nothing either!

I spent another long period with another manager in India to try to resolve the problem I have. The server is now working but they again changed passwords and I had to follow. Now I have two out of five addresses working. Unfortunately the phone's batteries gave out and I lost contact with him. I have to do it all over again tomorrow. He was a nice enough chap and said that I will get 'some' compensation - Dunston can afford it but I'll get me screws out............

With this sort of thing going on in the UK I can't believe that you haven't either risen up and stormed the BT tower, with ceremonial guillotining of the chief executive and/or his secretaries, or all committed suicide. As an (expat) Brit it really does surprise me what my countrymen put up with.

Over here in my part of Europe, the local provider is UPC who are not great either, but everyone you speak to is local, and you can even go to their office across town and yell at them in person (did that once, they gave me a brand new modem for free) :}

Plusnet help desk is in Yorkshire and they answer your calls with a background of 'On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at - as long as you can cope with the accent it is NOT in India:ok:

Daughter needed land line and broadband in the flat she has just moved in to. Her last place was Virgin equipped, and once they had got it up and running, (about 3 weeks!!) it worked fine.
However, where she now is is not Virgin's cheapest area.
Talktalk did not get a look in as their service is non-existent.

So plus net deal for unlimited non-fibre at £2.50 a month for 12 months, plus line rental, (paid as a lumpsum) was the cheapest.
As Mixture says, paying such low prices means that service might not be the best. But while it works, (grand total of 6 days from order to active broadband), she is not moaning at £2.50/month. And the call centre is in the UK.....

PS - the young, huh!! - she has free landline calls over weekends. What on earth do I want a land line phone for she says. She only uses her mobile.

I do some work for various smallish companies out here and none of them have landlines, we all use mobiles. The entire office complex I'm currently in doesn't have any landlines at all - if there's a "desk phone" it's VOIP. Welcome to the future :E

- which is being held back by HMG and BT and their insistance on landline broadband:mad:

When I was in the UK I had cable broadband, no landline :cool:

...and you still can in a relatively small number of locations, mostly 'urban'. Since your 'time' HMG were 'persuaded' by the monopolistic BT to give them all the public money to enable "95% of UK properties" to have 'slow' speed broadband down the copper/aluminium landlines (owned, as luck would have it, by BT) fed from fibre cabinets (owned by BT...) by 2017.

You are still 'stuffed' in many many parts of the UK with poor or no mobile (2G) signals and no cable.