TalkTalk Business: Leased Lines Review

TalkTalk Business provides super affordable leased lines alongside friendly and dedicated customer support. We’d recommend it for small and medium-sized businesses in particular.

But what else does TalkTalk’s leased lines service have to offer? What are its weaknesses? And, perhaps most importantly, how much does it cost? Armed with extensive research, we put TalkTalk under the microscope to answer these questions and more. In this review, you can find out whether it’s the right leased lines provider for your business.

You can also try our free quote-finding tool to compare tailored, no-obligation quotes from the best leased lines providers for you, including TalkTalk. It’s fast, easy, and free.

The pros and cons of TalkTalk’s leased lines

What are TalkTalk’s features and benefits?

First off, let’s take a look at the stats worth knowing:

So what are the best things about TalkTalk Business’ leased lines service? Let’s explore.

✓ Award-winning customer support

As UK telecoms giants go, TalkTalk has an excellent reputation among its customers. Where most leased lines providers achieve scores between one and three out of five on Trustpilot, TalkTalk Business has scored 4.4 – a rare feat in the world of telecoms. We’ll explore some of those scores further on in this review.

So, what makes TalkTalk’s customer support offering so good? Firstly, you’ll have your own dedicated, UK-based account manager to deal with, and they’ll be chosen for you based on how well they know your industry and understand your needs, which is reassuring.

You’ll have access to support 24/7, every day of the year (though this is common among leased line services). It’s also worth noting that TalkTalk Business doesn’t operate on a reseller model, so all your customer support queries will be dealt with directly by the company.

If you experience an outage, TalkTalk is committed to responding within 30 minutes and delivering a fix within five hours for dedicated leased lines, or seven hours for EoFTTC or EFM lines. This matches the commitments offered by many other suppliers, so it isn’t blowing anyone out of the water. But it’s good to know that you wouldn’t be waiting longer for TalkTalk than you would for anyone else, especially if you have a dedicated leased line (more on the specific line types and their prices later!).

✓ Affordable and transparent pricing

You can scroll down to our section on TalkTalk’s costs for all the details on this, but suffice it to say that TalkTalk’s leased lines tend to be cheaper than those from BT, Virgin Media, and Vodafone.

Plus, TalkTalk says it’s keen to keep its pricing as transparent as possible, assuring us that the price you’re given is the price you’ll pay – and if unexpected, unwieldy costs crop up during your site survey, you’ll be given the option to cancel free of charge, which is a level of respect you don’t often see.

✓ The UK’s biggest network

You can’t talk about TalkTalk without acknowledging that it boasts the largest network in the UK, with equipment in over 3,000 exchanges across the country. In fact, TalkTalk says its network is over 60% bigger than its nearest competitor’s.

But what does this mean for your business? Generally, a larger network is a more accessible one. With TalkTalk’s network being so large, chances are good that you’ll be able to connect to it with minimal additional construction work and costs.

How much do TalkTalk’s business leased lines cost?

TalkTalk’s leased lines are among the most affordable on the market. Let’s take a look at the company’s price plans:

Installation costs

While leased line installations can be an expensive business, TalkTalk’s are actually often free. Free installation is available with the following plans:

• An EoFTTC line on a three-year contract
• An EFM line on a three-year contract
• A 100Mbps or 1Gbps dedicated leased line on a three-year contract

However, when installation fees are charged, TalkTalk doesn’t clarify how much they’ll be (often, it’s subject to your location and other factors).

That said, we know that TalkTalk does aim to make pricing as transparent as possible once you’ve started the setup process. If any unexpected costs rear their ugly heads as a result of your site survey, TalkTalk promises to inform you of them as soon as possible, giving you the option to continue at cost or cancel free of charge. We see this as a breath of fresh air in an industry where businesses are, sadly, at risk of being charged expensive one-off fees weeks into their installation.

Is TalkTalk right for my business?

“I run a small business”

TalkTalk is definitely worth investigating. In fact, in our guide to the best leased line providers in the UK, we recommend TalkTalk as our top pick for small businesses!

Its affordable pricing makes it a relatively cheap option for small ventures, particularly those that don’t actually need a huge amount of bandwidth – if 10Mbps is fast enough for your small team, you can pay as little as £90 per month.

There’s also the fact that TalkTalk Business’ customers speak very highly of its customer support (we’ll explore what they say in the next section!). When you manage a small business that’s new to a particular service, solid technical support from your provider can prove invaluable.

“I run a large business”

TalkTalk’s leased lines service is targeted towards businesses with up to 100 employees, so if your team is climbing above that number, you might want to look elsewhere.

“My business isn’t based in a major city”

Sometimes, being based in a more rural part of the UK – or even simply not being close enough to a major city – can prove problematic when it comes to connecting up a wired leased line, as the necessary infrastructure might not be in place. However, TalkTalk’s network is the biggest in the UK, which means it might well be able to provide connectivity in your area. It’s worth investigating!

What do TalkTalk’s customer reviews say?

As we’ve already mentioned, TalkTalk Business has one of the best reputations we’ve seen among telecoms customers. To give you a flavour of what its customers think, we’ve scoured the web for the most helpful reviews.

The vast majority of reviewers (73% of those on Trustpilot, in fact) give five-star ratings, and call out the helpfulness and speed of the people they’ve dealt with at TalkTalk:

But we did also note this reviewer, who said they had trouble when their contact was away:

And this reviewer, who experienced problems with their direct debit:

That said, based on the mass of customer reviews available online, it seems that issues like the above are rare. It’s also worth noting that TalkTalk responds to all Trustpilot reviews, offering next steps to solve any issues.