TalkTalk still letting down its customers (1)
Four years ago, I lost my Internet service for 10 days and blogged about the horrendous experience here. This week I fell into another black hole in cyberspace …
My Internet service provider is TalkTalk which, ever since Ofcom has published comparative complaints data, has been an outlier with the worst record of any ISP. The latest data from Ofcom – published a few days ago – confirms the downward trend in TalkTalk’s level of complaints but it is still the worst performer (after a specific spike in complaints to Orange).
Now, some time on Tuesday evening, I stopped receiving e-mails on all my devices: Mac mini, iPad and iPhone. I can still send e-mails and search the web but people trying to e-mail me are being told that my mail quota is exceeded.
It would relieve a little of my immense frustration if I could share a summary of my travails with you.
I was out of town all day Wednesday, so I called TalkTalk on Wednesday evening. I was advised that they were suffering from an outage and even given details of the route allegedly involved. I was assured that the outage would be resolved in the next 24-48 hours.
Since nothing happened, on Thursday evening, I called TalkTalk again. This time I was told that there was no outage, my line was working normally, and the problem must be with my Apple e-mail settings.
Today I started with Apple who throughout have been great. They told me that I needed to obtain mail server settings from TalkTalk before they could help me. So back to TalkTalk who gave me all the details.
I then spent an amazing two hours with three Apple people who were all incredibly patient with me. Eventually I was asked to delete the e-mail account on all three of my Apple devices and set up accounts again reinserting all the settings. Things looked good when e-mail started to load on the Mac mini, but the e-mail dated from 5 March and, when it reached this Tuesday evening, stopped – after loading 754 items.
Apple assured me that all this demonstrated that the problem was not with settings on my Apple devices but with TalkTalk. So back to TalkTalk for the fourth time. It took me another hour talking to another three call centre staff in India before they finally accepted that a) it was their problem; b) they could not resolve it and it would be referred to the network service desk. I’ve now had a text message on my mobile to confirm that the desk is working on my case …
So, if you are a relative, a friend, or work for one of the five organisations with which I serve. please bear with me and, if you need to be in contact, text, phone or use Vee’s e-mail.