Slamming/unwanted cease

[korriemia]

I understand this is a community help forum so wondering if anyone has had a similar experience and can provide advice or better knows the processes at play here. 

I was with TalkTalk untill the 29th of May when my internet stopped working. Contacted support and after a few hours of frustration with support I was advised a cease was placed on my line on the 16th may. To cut a long story short, my neighbours where changing providers and their new provider EE took their address down wrong and put mine down instead, this transferred my line to EE on the 29th instead of my neighbours.  

I was never notified by TalkTalk of this cease so the whole thing came as a suprise to me. I've been struggling since the 29th to get broadband back with TalkTalk, I thought it would be a simple case of just getting them to ask open reach to switch my line back, but apparently not.

I decided to just switch to BT and  I've been given the go live date of the 17th jun. That will be 19 days with no internet, as a disabled student this has honestly been devastating as the end of year deadlines approach for assignments. 

Has anyone had something similar happen? Is their anyway to get fiber back on quicker or am I just unlucky? Can anyone explain to me how this has happened and why it's so difficult to get your fiber back on and working 😭  if my line is already connected to BT/EE why do I have to wait 14 days for it to go live after I sign up? Can't they just sent a router out asap and do a remote turn on or something  😂 or am I delusional and the process is far more complicated than I can understand? 

[Keith_Beddoe]

@korriemia 

Welcome to this user forum for BT Residential phone and broadband customers.

There is a 10 day period before a line can be taken over by another provider, this is an Ofcom ruling to prevent slamming. 

TalkTalk has let you down by not informing you of the takeover request.

There will now be pending cease orders to close before BT can takeover your service.

There is no way to speed up this process.

[iniltous]

As far as your assertion that if you are already connected to EE why can’t they arrange for you to use it  if you agree to being an EE  customer , that won’t work ….your neighbour who gave the wrong address or the ISP EE that selected the wrong address , ( it  doesn’t matter really who messed up  ) will have realised they have not changed to their new provider  ( because of the confusion  with your line ) and  will presumably have already contacted their new ISP EE saying ‘ why am I still connected to my old ISP and not you guys ‘ , the new ISP EE  realised they used the wrong address and that order is cancelled , ( cancelling your address with EE ) and a completely new one ( with the correct address ) is raised……..you may find that you are disconnected from EE  pretty quickly and you are already disconnected from TT .

Your choice is to let TT  restore your service with a new order …( and as stated they should have contacted you to say a takeover has been started  )  or you select a new ISP , it won’t make any difference unfortunately to the time it takes to reconnect you , that may take a while .

[korriemia]

Thank you for letting me know about the 10 days, I didn't know about this.

Do you know if it would be worth going for some sort of compensation from them? I've had to spend  money on extra mobile data so I can hotspot my phone to my laptop for my studies. All I've been offered so far is £1.78 money back from the few days left on the month I paid for which I couldn't use (they even had the cheek to suggest I owed them money for contract cancellation!) 

Is there some sort of rule where they should have let me know that someone requested a takeover of my line and given me an opportunity to dispute or else would mistakes like this not happen all the time if no one was informed ? 😩 

[iniltous]

As stated part of the process to pick up mistakes and ‘slamming’ attempts is that all ISP on Openreach  send out a communication saying ‘sorry to see you leave , if this is not wanted contact us immediately on this number to cancel the migration ‘ ….if the process had worked and TT has sent that message , you would have called them saying ‘ I’m not leaving’  , and TT would have gotten Openreach to cancel the EE order ….so if TT  didn’t send a communication they failed ……

TBH , before you blame them  you should check your spam folder etc in case the notification is in there , if you already have , then it’s their fault ….however are you sure that your address was correct with TT as you neighbour would have had to make an obvious error not noticing at various points ( including the contract summary ) that it had your address on it and not their own .

[korriemia]

Ahh, that makes sense. Thank you for your response, I don't know how any of this works, but your explanation helps me understand why it's not just a simple switch on. . . I decided to switch to BT after most relatives I've spoken to are with them and satisfied, so I made my order this afternoon. Just want to wash my hands of TalkTalk. 

[korriemia]

Yes, I've checked my spam folder from the 16th (cease was received by them on the 16th) untill the 29th (day I lost service)... I had 4 spam emails and none where from talktalk.  I had 0 communication from talktalk on the matter in my main inbox either. 

@iniltous I just want to add, I've had multiple issues with this neighbour using my address by accident. Letters, parcels, take outs, emergency services even. I've spoken to them several times about it urging them to take up the ohonetic alphabet, it's an ongoing issue with them. I live in a block of flats so it's just the flat letter they keep mixing up😩  

[iniltous]

Must be a nightmare if they don’t take any care about   using the correct address especially as it’s so important when it comes to this  , but ultimately TT should have let you know before it took place so you could stop it before it happened if it was just your neighbour putting your address on their order .