Time Talk
Complaint 265403 Details

My father who nearly 80, unfortunately was conned into moving from Talk-Talk to a company called Time-Talk based in Burnley Lancashire.
They managed to move him without him realising he had been. They didn’t ask him for MAC number which I thought was very odd as you need one from your previous supplier to authorise any switch over. Anyway one when I had gone around to help move some stuff, he said he was having problems with the internet. So I checked and it was dead. Now I work for a small computer shop and the vast majority of call outs are people having problems with their broadband. So I’m no mug when it comes to diagnosing faults. Simply put there was no ADSL on that line full stop. The phone was still working though, which was one lucky thing as my Dad has just had a kidney transplant and gets his hospital appointment through it as they won’t ring a mobile. So I called Talk-Talk who informed me that they no longer supplied telecoms to the address. So I asked my father if he had cancelled the broadband and he said no they had only just sent a new contract out. It was only me reading the contract that noticed it wasn’t Talk-Talk! I asked him if he had talked to Time-Talk and he said no Talk-Talk had called him telling him they could offer a better tariff because he was such a low download user, but they would need his bank details to set up a direct debit for the new price. So I called Time-Talk which I had to wait for 45 minutes for them to answer, who said it was all perfectly legal they had done nothing wrong and the contract was binding, if I wanted to get out of it would cost £196! So I said I would complain to OFCOM which I have, they cut his phone off !
So for 12 weeks he has had no broadband and 6 weeks without a telephone. I called Time-Talk and asked them for a MAC number, they said it would take at least 2 weeks to generate one, that was 4 weeks ago. I emailed then two weeks ago because after calling OFCOM who we now have a case raised with had informed me that it should not take more than 5 days and in fact in most cases they can give you one there and then. They have replied today, I quote “Unfortunately Sir, there is a problem processing your MAC code, the order management team are looking into this and are aiming to get this resolved ASAP. It will be emailed to you as soon as possible.

Thankyou for your patiennce.” <- yes that’s their spell checker working just fine !
I pulled some strings and found out that there is an active tag on the line belonging to Kingston Communications who are now KC.com. They supply lines to Tpad who are Time-Talk. From what I can gather and this is from my Virgin Media contact , because we are resellers at the shop, Time-Talk owe KC.com a lot of money and that Time-Talk are hunting around for another supplier, hence all the complaints on the review boards, and the fact that the line is good according to a BT engineer but we are not being supplied Broadband.