Black Friday week deals: Until 30 November, TalkTalk is offering discounted rates on its Fast Broadband and Faster Fibre Broadband packages. The basic ADSL2+ package is reduced from £21.50 per month to £19.95 per month on an 18-month contract.
That’s not exactly a huge saving (it adds up to £27.90 across the full length of the contract) but the package was pretty cheap to begin with and there’s no setup fee so you’re looking at a total outlay of £359.10 over the course of the contract.
The Faster Fibre package, meanwhile, is reduced to £25 per month, making a total of £450 for eighteen months of 38Mbits/sec fibre or £590 if you add the 76Mbits/sec boost for an extra fiver a month. If you sign up for TV services then the 30-channel entertainment package is halved in price, too, so you’ll pay just £6 a month for Sky One, Fox et al for the next year and a half.
Get the TalkTalk Black Friday deal here
TalkTalk Broadband review
TalkTalk is one of the UK’s biggest ISPs. It isn't as large as BT, Sky or Virgin but, with around four million subscribers, it’s still a very popular provider.
It offers just two basic broadband packages: a standard ADSL2+ service called Fast Broadband and a 38Mbits/sec fibre-optic connection called, reasonably enough, Faster Fibre Broadband. You can optionally upgrade the latter with a “Speed Boost” to 76Mbits/sec – so effectively it’s a choice between the same three speed tiers as most other ISPs.
As well as the Speed Boost option, you can upgrade any package with unlimited UK phone calls for £8.50 a month, or take advantage of various international call plans. You can also tack on TV services for a one-off fee of £50, which gets you a pretty decent dual-tuner YouView set-top box, with 300GB of storage for recording, pausing and rewinding live TV.
Once you’ve got the box, an optional £12-a-month subscription brings you a selection of premium TV channels, including Sky One, Fox, SyFy, MTV and others. Sky Sports, Sky Cinema and various other channels can be added too, although they’re not cheap, and various films and TV shows, such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead, can be rented from TalkTalk’s own video-on-demand service.
TalkTalk Fast Broadband
TalkTalk’s entry-level broadband service is a standard ADSL2+ connection. As usual, it’s advertised as “up to” 17Mbits/sec, but ADSL2+ rarely gets close to this theoretical maximum: such packages more often give you download speeds of around 11-12Mbits/sec.
For many people that might well be enough. It’s fine for web-browsing and downloading apps and TV shows and you should even be fine to stream HD video from Netflix and other sources. If you want to stream 4K video without stuttering, however, you’ll most likely need to step up to a fibre package.
The Fast Broadband package is priced very similarly to rival ISPs’ ADSL2+ packages: an 18-month contract can be had for £21.50 a month with no setup fee. You can also opt for a 12-month contract, but the cost is much steeper, at £27 a month. TalkTalk offers a two-year option but that also costs £27 a month.
There’s no setup fee, no data cap and, according to TalkTalk, no traffic management except to prioritise video streaming, so your shows shouldn’t stutter if you’re double-screening.
Buy TalkTalk broadband from TalkTalk.co.uk
TalkTalk Faster Fibre Broadband
TalkTalk’s 38Mbits/sec fibre-optic service costs £27.50 a month on an 18-month contract, with no setup fee. Assuming your home can get a fibre connection, that’s a good price, although the 12-month option is less competitive, at £33.50 a month. As with the ADSL service, there are no caps or traffic-shaping policies.
For an extra £5 a month you can add the “Speed Boost” option, which upgrades your line to a theoretical maximum of 76Mbits/sec. Again, it’s a good deal for the money, though in practice you won’t see a doubling of speeds. Connections like this tend to deliver around 60Mbits/sec, no matter which ISP you go with.
Our biggest gripe with TalkTalk’s fibre packages concerns the supplied “Super Router”, which isn’t super at all. The company used to provide a quite decent Huawei HG635 router, but it’s now switched to the cheaper HG633. This is fine for everyday internet duties, but when it comes to copying files between computers or accessing a home NAS appliance its wireless performance is notably slower than rival routers such as the BT Home Hub. It doesn’t support Gigabit Ethernet either, so wired connections are limited to just 10% of the speed offered by other routers.
Buy TalkTalk broadband from TalkTalk.co.uk
TalkTalk broadband prices and packages
| TalkTalk Fast Broadband | TalkTalk Faster Fibre Broadband | TalkTalk Faster Fibre plus Speed Boost | |
| Price per month, including line rental | £21.50 | £27.50 | £32.50 |
| Setup fee | None | None | None |
| "Up to" speed | 17Mbits/sec | 38Mbits/sec | 76Mbits/sec |
| Usage allowance | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Contract length | 18 months | 18 months | 18 months |
TalkTalk broadband: Coverage
TalkTalk’s fibre-optic connections are leased from BT Openreach – so if you can get fibre broadband from BT, you can get it from TalkTalk.
If you’re not sure whether your home is able to get a fibre connection or not, you can use the availability checker on TalkTalk’s website to see what services are offered in your area and get an estimate of what sort of download speeds to expect.
TalkTalk broadband: Performance and customer service
Ofcom published its last review of ISP performance in November 2016, and TalkTalk’s scores were, to be honest, not very impressive. On the basic Fast Broadband service, Ofcom found TalkTalk’s average download speed over a 24-hour period was no more than 10Mbits/sec with minimum speeds falling as low as 7.7Mbits/sec. That makes it the slowest ADSL2+ offering among any of the big-name ISPs.
It was a similar story with TalkTalk’s fibre packages. The 38Mbits/sec service was found, in real-world testing, to average 32.8Mbits/sec over a 24-hour period – again, lower than any of TalkTalk’s major rivals. And the 76Mbits/sec connection averaged just 56.7Mbits/sec – 25% slower than the advertised speed. To be fair, no ISP currently delivers the full 76Mbits/sec over Openreach fibre – if you want to go much faster you’ll need to go with Virgin. Even so, BT and EE were both a step ahead of TalkTalk over the same infrastructure, with average speeds of around 61Mbits/sec.
To be clear, the performance gap between TalkTalk and its competitors isn’t huge and, if you’re not taxing your internet connection to the limit, then a few megabits here or there won’t make much difference. TalkTalk’s fibre packages are perfectly fast enough for streaming and web-browsing – you’ll just have to wait a few seconds longer for big downloads.
Buy TalkTalk broadband from TalkTalk.co.uk
Perhaps a bigger concern is customer satisfaction. Ofcom’s latest consumer report found that TalkTalk accounted for 29 out of every 100,000 broadband complaints filed in the first quarter of 2017. That’s against an industry average of 21. Only BT fared worse, with 34 complaints per 100K, while Virgin and Sky led the pack with just 13 and eight complaints per 100,000 respectively.
TalkTalk also scored poorly when it came to dealing with those complaints. During 2016, Ofcom found that just 51% of TalkTalk customers reported they were satisfied with the way their complaint was handled – the lowest proportion in the industry.
TalkTalk broadband review: Verdict
TalkTalk’s 18-month contracts are competitively priced, especially when you remember that there are no setup fees, no caps and no traffic shaping and a promise of no price rises during your contract term.
Performance lags a half-step behind rival ISPs, however, and the cheap router that’s provided means you won’t get the best speeds on your home network either. Factor in an iffy customer-satisfaction record and it’s hard to recommend TalkTalk over its competitors.