A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by TalkTalk with regard to transferring my telephone line rental to them. As they already provided my Internet (as a result of their taking over Nildram), it seemed like a sensible move, especially as the price was attractive.
On the 30th June I received a letter advising me of a new ADSL login and password. Alarm bells rang. Why did I need a new ADSL login? I’ve always resisted any change to this aspect of my service because of the likelihood of it being broken as a result. With considerable trepidation I changed the login details on my router and my worst fears came true. Everything broke.
With my previous login, the Router had static address of 82.133.98.89. I then had a subnet that sat on the other side of the router, 82.133.6.112/29 which gave me eight addresses that were routed to the Internet. With the new login, I just received a single, dynamic address for the router. I lost all means to route my old 82.133.6.112 subnet through this, with the consequence that all my services instantly died.
I’m not even going to attempt to document the string of phone calls that happened next, it would be incredibly boring and repetitive. Suffice to say that the technical people at TalkTalk kept passing me to the Customer Services and Sales people who in turn passed me back again. Each of these passes involved sitting in a caller queue for up to 30 minutes. I get the strong impression they simply don’t understand what I’m asking for and that’s pretty frustrating when from my perspective, they took it away.
At the moment I’ve at least got a static IP for the router assigned which has enabled me to set up some NAT rules to get traffic through for critical services like Email and DNS. I suspect there is going to be considerable frustration before I get back to a properly working configuration though. The worst part of all this is that I’m dealing with a company who are supposed to specialize in Internet Service provision but in reality have no consideration for the services of their customer. Me. They took my service which worked perfectly, broke it and then leave me to drive its recovery. Absolutely nobody in TalkTalk has taken any ownership for getting my service back to a working state.
This morning I’ve talked to somebody who has promised to allocate me a new subnet but he states it will comprise four addresses. This is bonkers because two of those (the top and bottom) are reserved so I’ll only get two usable addresses. At the moment though I’m so fed up with the whole saga that I’ll gladly take two addresses in preference to none at all. Now I’m off to email them in the hope that putting it in writing will clarify my requirements.
One good point for all the people I’ve spoken to: They’ve been polite and tried to help me. It’s not their fault and I don’t want to make it sounds that way. It’s their employer I’m mad at, not them.