Why, if market forces are at work, is a company offering free broadband not doing well during the credit crunch? Surely the ISP's that can LLU an exchange should be getting floods of customers keen to save a buck. Granted not every exchange is or even can be LLU'd, but I would have thought the masses would currently be flocking to talktalk/sky/other LLU operator to save a shed load of money, in my own case in excess of 25 quid a month when we switched from BT a few months back. Phorm possibly an influence or still not getting enough recognition?

Paris is worried about the credit crunch

The quality of service may be something t do with it. At peak times my CPW broadband is the speed of dial up, at none peak times it is very very fast.

Also Sky is doing the normal Murdoch tactic of pricing others out of the market at the moment before ramping up prices.

Maybe people are prepared for quality and CPW is not quality, it is cheap and nasty.

Jez Caudle, I fyou are having problems then nip over to the TalkTalk members forums. You should not be getting a massive drop off in speed and either

a) you are on a congested exchange which has a planned upgrade date

b) you are on an unsuitable profile

We'll be able to give your line a once over and let you know.

From what I've seen at my friends houses, almost all of them are in "congested exchange planned for upgrade" or on "unsuitable profile".

Sorry but in big cities you (especially with some council estates nearby) you have no chance of getting anything resembling broadband between 5pm and 10pm.

Same applies to Virgin. Not to mention Tiscali. BT and Sky are better but who knows for how long. Margins are razor thin and iPlayer and YouTube are taking the toll.

Want Broadband? Go for Be(o2).

If you can put up with the completely non-technical first line "technical support" in india then CPW are pretty good, I had problems for a month but gave them a chance to sort it and they did, it's now rock solid and very reliable.

CPW also listened to their customers regarding Phorm and there was quite a debate in the forum, our feedback was fed back and not just ignored which I believe was instrumental in CPW's decision on the phorm issue, it looks they really do listen to their customers.

They just need to sort out those ridiculous indian call centres that really havent got a clue.

The tux penguin because CPW "only support windows"

really not sure what the fuss is about. Ignoring the pointless credit crunch remark - let's face it how can it explain several months of trading? - carephone is still pulling in 100k new broadband punters, which plenty of ISP's aren't doing. Another thing to remember is this product isn't marketed heavily outside the CPW stores, mainly because it's a budget product with a tight budget. So 4% growth on your bb base doesn't sound so bad unless your a stupid city analyst who thinks 20k less bb members than forecast is really that significant in a company generating billions of pounds revenue...

But the analysts think 20,000 is a really important number at the minute. Seeing as there's probably going to be 20,000 less of them in the coming months. They didn't forecast that one either :o

Mine's just like the Emperor's new one.

Know quite a few people who have moved away from talk talk because of bad bb experiences

O2 is the best

Every dealing I've ever had with CPW has been bad (phones not turning up on the quoted delivery date, no response to e-mail and the best bit was when I ordered a replacement aerial quite a few years ago for my trusty Ericsson S868 and they sent the wrong one, when I rang up the guy's response was and I quote 'what do you want me to do about it!'

CPW suck, period

Is that a large percentage of its customer base are 1st time broadband users, These users obviously need more support for basic issues, like how to read your bill, or what that flashing green light meants etc...that's why the 1st line team of tech support aren't much help for people with technical problems

Most people in the UK have never heard of LLU or ADSL etc... and quite few of them can barely turn a computer on never mind set up broadband on it, and carphone have attracted a lot of these people with free broadband

I don't believe there are any more problems with TalkTalk broadband than and of the rest, they got to big to quick, and now they've got over it so should everyone else... and making Phorm 'opt-in' shows they listen to their customers

I work real live uk support for an ISP, and the number of unhappy ex aol-ers I deal with is amazing, the all tell the same story of connections going south since cpw came to town.

Oddly don't get too many talk-talkers, I guess they just don't get the "paying for broadband" thing.

I'm one of the sad souls who is quite happy to have 2mg connection for less than a tenner a month.

Believe it or not, there are a few of us left, who appreciate the problems of merging two different networks and they kept the 'disconnections' to overnight at weekends, so it didn't really affect me.

I just wish they would communicate what they are doing as I can't believe that someone gets up one morning and decides to switch blocks of customers off while they reconfigure that area.

No where on AOL is a status page or anything resembling work in progress.

Even the 'help-line' (now that is a joke!!), isn't told, so you ring to to ask if they might have a problem only to be told to reboot your computer/reset the modem/change settings/defrag your hard disk etc.

It's really not funny!!

The tux penguin because CPW "only support windows", as an Opal engineer I know we support Mac's as well :)

Your bittorents are throttled, HTTP and FTP traffic are not, if you have an peak time issue then I can tell you when the upgrade is due if you tell me your exchange

I have been with AOL for over 10 years. The service has always been reliable, with excellent customer support. However, since the takeover by CW things have gone very rapidly downhill. First their call centres were outsourced to India, it takes 20 minutes to get through and more than 40 minutes to talk to a tech support person (and that's a minimum, it can take over an hour sometimes). Once you get through it is very difficult to explain any problems due to language difficulties and most people i know around here, and on various forums such as digitalspy.co.uk say they eventually give up in frustration. Then the problems got much worse when CW started migrating all of us over to the their CW/Opal Telecom network. We have suffered very, very frequent outages sometimes for days at a time with NO information being given on the AOL or CW websites if you do get online. Just this week we were unable to access Google or Youtube for hours. Many on digitalspy have reported exactly the same and there are many threads in their Broadband forum about these problems. Many users are leaving in disgust and the story is the same on many other broadband related forums and blogs from disgruntled AOL users.

To top it all, a friend of mine who lives just next door has a 2Mb connection on the same exchange with another ISP without problems, AOL advised me 1Mb is the maximum I can receive, despite me argueing with them they refused to budge on that issue at all.

I have absolutely no doubt that many possible customers have a look at tech forums and the like, see the problems listed, and choose another supplier instead of AOL or CW and this is one part of why their figures are disappointing (perhaps a small part).

I was even considering signing up for another 2 years before all of this happened, and have decided to give it another month or so before I make a decision. One thing I have discovered is that MANY of the current problems appear to be DNS related, I changed my router to use OpenDNS and things have settled down a fair bit, although there are still random outages.

And my final rant, their terms and conditions are ambigious to say the least. The terms and conditions regarding fair use say that AOL decide what is fair use, AOL decide how much you download before it triggers a slow down, AOL decide how long your download speeds are restricted and AOL give you no control panel where you can see how much you have downloaded and how much is left before you hit your limit. Almost every other major ISP does, and their fair use and download limits are normally much clearer.