The TalkTalk Blog

Having been absent for a while, I’ve decided that with so much going on I should reinstate my blog. I stopped it 18 months ago when we started talktalkmembers as a forum and information point for all our subscribers and people interested in TalkTalk. If you haven’t visited it yet, it is a fantastic source of information and tools to get the best from your service.

TalkTalk continues to grow strongly with nearly 120,000 people joining the service in the last quarter of 2008. The problems we experienced with too much demand at launch still haunt us as a management team and we have spent the past 12 months really working on improving the quality of the product and the processes that support it. We have been rewarded by seeing the ratings we get from independent tests, steadily move us up the league of suppliers.

2009 is going to be about enhancing the range of services we can offer you, increasing network capacity to keep up with the growing demand our users have to download more and more from the internet and making sure we continue to be the very best value supplier in the market place.

Boosts – In November we simplified our pricing and introduced a new range of products to supplement your service. These are called Boosts and allow you to customise your TalkTalk account to give you just what you need. We firmly believe that you should only have to pay for what you need and, unlike other suppliers who charge you for what you don’t use, you can add and remove your Boosts whenever you want. We’ll be introducing some new Boosts during the year, let me know if you have any ideas about products and services you’d like to see. Find out more about Boosts

Capacity – A big issue in broadband and it’s getting bigger. With the growth in the popularity of services such as YouTube and the BBC’s i-player, we are seeing the amount of data downloaded increase literally month by month. More and more people are online during the peak hours with many using multiple devices in their wifi home and sharing the connection.

One of the big misconceptions about broadband, is that speed you experience is based solely on the line from your house to the exchange. In fact, very often it is the capacity of the connection from your local exchange to the rest of the internet that causes the speed loss. The peak time for using the internet is 8.15 at night and, to use my local exchange as an example, there are 1200 people connected to the TalkTalk equipment in the exchange. I get a download throughput speed of 5.8 meg you can check your speed at talktalkmembers speedchecker. There are hardly any websites in the world that will serve me content at faster than 5.8 meg and the service feels really fast.

We have connected high capacity fibre optical lines to each local exchange to join up with the rest of our network and ultimately on to the internet. When everybody is surfing at 8.15pm, we need to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to get all that data from the internet to all the TalkTalk users on my local exchange simultaneously with no degradation in their normal speed. It’s a bit like running trains during rush hour, you need to have enough track and carriages to give everyone a seat between 7 and 9 in the morning. If anyone is left standing, you have failed. It means we have lots of unused capacity during the rest of the day, but we have to build to the peak.

These graphs show the usage by our customers in three ways, firstly the cumulative number of people logged in at anyone time during the week, secondly how much bandwidth we are consuming during the average week, you can see that at peak times it hits over 80gbits per second and finally you can see the shape of traffic over an average Saturday, building up to a mid evening peak.

We have been very proactive in anticipating growth in usage and continually add capacity to the network – indeed, we’re planning to increase exchange capacity backhaul tenfold over the next 18 months. You can check out all our exchanges at talktalkmembers exchange capacity. From the tests we do, it is clear that a number of our competitors are not being as proactive as they should be and their service deteriorates markedly at peak times.

We are committed to being open about our network and I think we are the only major network that actually shows our capacity performance publicly. As experience and knowledge of the internet grows I believe backhaul capacity, to use it’s technical name, will become a bigger and bigger issue and others will have to follow our lead and actually tell their customers what is really happening on their network.

We have also noticed that many more people are uploading data on the network, this is things such as posting photos or videos to hosted sites, backing up data and people who log into office networks to work from home. We have recently doubled the upstream capacity on everyone’s lines and you should now find us one of the best ISP’s for upstream speed.

Value – TalkTalk was founded on value and we work very hard to be as efficient as possible and keep our prices as competitive as possible. One of the things we have been thinking about is what happens in these difficult economic times if one of our customers gets into financial difficulty or loses their job. Having a phone line and access to broadband is essential these days, and it felt as though it would be a real slap in the face to someone already struggling for us to cut off the service if they were having difficulty paying.

So, from the end of January, we are introducing the Emergency Plan, if you are an existing TalkTalk customer who has paid us in the past but gets in to difficulty, please call us and we have a service with reduced speed and functionality that we can arrange for you to have access to whilst you get back on your feet. We sincerely hope you don’t need it, but want you to understand that we are just as interested in you when things aren’t going well. Many of you stood by us, when things weren’t going great for us.

Thanks for reading this, we have created a forum where you can post comments about the topics in the blog and I look forward to getting the conversation going.

Yours ever

Charles

Responses [11]

Posted by Charles Dunstone on 28 January 2009 14:38:00 GMT #