TalkTalk

Charles Dunstone, a well known entrepreneur and founder of Carphone Warehouse has quit as chair of the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Apparently, the government refused to reappoint a trustee because they advocated for “decolonising” the curriculum. More information is available on the Financial Times.

Normally I wouldn’t be interested in posting about such things, but my blog has a bit of history with Charles Dunstone. He was in charge of UK ISP TalkTalk when it came out. Some people had problems and people complaining about it resulted in my most popular blog post.

Some of the complaints led to some interesting solutions, and I briefly included Charles Dunstone’s email address.

I just got an email announcing that due to some sort of technical difficulties, my unbundling has been put back. No word on a new date either.

I got an unexpected email today from Catherine Wynne of the BBC. Apparently they are doing a piece about TalkTalk on the 6 o’clock news tonight and during the research came across my TalkTalk problems post (the one with 500+ comments - mostly about problems people are having).

They would like a number of comments from TalkTalk users regarding the service. If you’re interested (and read this quite a bit before 6pm 27th February), call:

Catherine Wynne’s Number snipped since it’s no longer relevant

Yesterday I received a letter from TalkTalk announcing their equipment had been installed in my local exchange and that I would be connected at the end of March. Which according to some people may be the same time that I lose my internet access and phone line. They say it should only go down for twenty minutes and make big deal out of the fact that BT engineers will be doing the actual changeover. Luckily I have internet access at work so I’ll let you know either way.

Phil Jones has written a guide to getting TalkTalk broadband working.

Importantly the guide tells you how to do it without using the setup CD - quite a few of the problems people have had might not have happened had they not used the CD.

It’s in depth, complete and for the most part anyone should be able to follow it. I’m not sure the average user would be up to fitting a network card (something only a few people would have to do) but as he says, you may know someone who could help.

As many of you may be aware (most of you judging by the search engine keywords people use to get here with), I’m a TalkTalk customer. Now quite a few people are having problems with TalkTalk. Luckily I’ve had no problems with TalkTalk (although that might change when I’m unbundled. And for the most part that’s still true, although I did recently have a minor problem that led to me calling TalkTalk support.

Firstly, the problem I had was nothing to do with the Internet. It was a problem calling Julia in America. I would call and get nothing but silence. After a while it would ring but someone else would answer the phone who apparently couldn’t hear me. After talking to Julia over the Internet I discovered that she could hear me and she could also hear the third person. Very strange. Another point is that to call Julia and it be free (well at least included in the £10 a month we pay) I have to dial a prefix. Without the prefix everything was fine. So it was probably some obscure routing problem specific to TalkTalk.

So I called their support line. Specifically the one for landline faults. I got through straight away and told them I was having a problem calling America. They said it was a known issue and they were dealing with it. 24 hours later it was working fine.

I tell you this simply to point out that not quite everyone is having a problem with TalkTalk…

Ooh, drama. I recently received an email from a Carphone Warehouse representative asking me to remove the personal information about one of their employees I had published. Specifically, two of Charles Dunstone’s email addresses.

If one or both of the email addresses are actually personal addresses of Mr Dunstone and this is an attempt to protect them, then it’s rather futile. Firstly because I first heard of them from a commenter so someone else obviously knew it a while ago and as probably told others. Secondly, the fact that they were published for even a moment on the web means they’ve been scraped and stolen by hundreds of bots. So if they are being bombarded by emails offering cheap OEM software, fake Rolex watches, dodgy claims about various stocks or warnings about losing access to a PayPal account, I apologise.

As for the many emails from customers trying to sort out problems with their service? Well if people were getting the replies they wanted from the public emails then none of this would have happened. I should also point out that the email contained a standard disclaimer saying the correspondence was private. I figured that since it specifically regarded a public action (i.e. blatantly changing content on the site) then people would notice anyway and an explanation was in order.

As a final personal disclaimer I would like to say that unlike many others I still haven’t had any problems with TalkTalk as a customer.

AOL UK (that would be Carphone Warehouse now) are advertising wireless broadband for the same price as regular broadband.

What this means is instead of getting a free ADSL modem, you get a free combined wireless router/ADSL modem allowing you to create a wireless home network with the Internet accessible from all the computers. Quite a few companies advertise a similar service as wireless broadband.

There are companies slowly appearing however offering genuine wireless broadband via WiMAX, for example now. Once the availability increases the issue of what “wireless broadband” means will become more important.

In an interesting move, AOL have old of their UK business to none other than Carphone Warehouse. This will not mean in re-branding so it seems AOL and TalkTalk will remain separate. It also seems that AOL will take control of advertising through TalkTalk as part of the deal. More information is available from BBC News.

A few recent entries to the list of problems with TalkTalk seem like they could be software related.

People not being able to use MSN Messenger or having problems getting their TalkTalk email for instance. The first one could be caused by a badly configured firewall which the TalkTalk software installs and the second by an apparent typo in the default mail settings. The reason I bring this up is because installing the the TalkTalk software is one thing I never did. Since I was going to use a router with a modem built in I didn’t bother waiting for my welcome pack and just tried from the day they said the broadband would be active and everything worked fine.

The irony is one of the first things any broadband technical support would ask you if you had a problem would be whether you are using a modem or a router since a modem should be simpler.