TalkTalk was clearly inundated by the success of their “free broadband for life” offer. The offer being styled as free has of course reulted in a slap on the wrist for Dunstone’s Carphone Whorehouse from the advertising standards council. This was on the grounds that the broadband offered was not free but part of a package.

The company has been finding it very difficult to sustain new customers, is failing to fix line faults, has not purchased enough network capacity to service customer needs, offers terrible “customer service” and routinely fails to make promised callbacks. Pretty soon there will be a mass of complaints overwhelming the company and sinking it.

This is already obvious to many purchasers of services from TalkTalk whose personal experience is that they can not even contact customer services. The phone doesn’t work, or the broadband, or both. Or the broadband works but not at certain times or the phone. The company never seems to fix faults but marks them as fixed or loses the fault report from their system - an innovative customer service solution but probably destined for disaster.

And when one does try and phone customer services, one call in two is touted to South Africa or India - where every operator has a script which says “I am sorry but …. (whatever the customer wants) … is not possible” and the other call either doesn’t get through or after a half hour wait the phone cuts off. Occassionally one actually talks to a customer service person, in the UK, who knows their job (and is therefore probably looking for another one) and something actually gets done.

Charles Dunstone plans to become a multibillionaire. This must surely be looking shaky. To help him along the road to ruin a new website is under development TalkShitTalk.co.uk will become a centralised portal for horror stories about TalkTalk, a help site to identify and resolve customer issues and the beginning of a “Class Action Lawsuit” by customers determined not to let Mr Dunstones “I’ll get rich at the expense of your frustration” scheme succeed. Investors - Beware.