Like some other UK broadband providers, TalkTalk has invested in its own exchange infrastructure, known as local-loop-unbundling (LLU), with 92% of its customer base unbundled as of December 2012.

An initial trial was conducted in the Manchester region, and three months later, TalkTalk launched with a guarantee that calls would be cheaper than with their perceived chief competitor BT.

That same year, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) challenged the legitimacy of TalkTalk's claim that this service was truly "free".

[8] TalkTalk allowed customers to escape the binding 18-month contract for broadband "if it had failed to keep its service commitments in their case".

[14] In November 2008, Charles Dunstone was reported to be looking to demerge TalkTalk from the main Carphone Warehouse business.

[20] The Carphone Warehouse's full-year earnings statement in November 2009 revealed the TalkTalk customer base had risen to 4.1 million following the purchase of Tiscali UK earlier in the year.

[26] In a study carried out by UK telecoms regulator Ofcom in 2010, TalkTalk was found to have average speeds of 7.7-9.3 Mbit/sec, while it was advertised as "up to" 24 Mbit/sec.

[30] On 8 January 2015, it was confirmed that TalkTalk would purchase the on-demand entertainment service Blinkbox and broadband business of Tesco for around £5 million.

[31] The purchase of Blinkbox was finalised immediately, and the transfer of broadband and home telephone customers was due to be completed by the end of 2015.

[33] Also in early 2015, TalkTalk transferred 108,000 broadband customers outside its LLU network to Fleur Telecom, a subsidiary of Daisy Group.

[34] In October 2015, TalkTalk experienced a "significant and sustained cyber-attack", during which personal and banking details of up to four million customers is thought to have been accessed.

On 5 October 2016, TalkTalk was fined £400,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office for its negligence on securing clients data.

[46] On 17 December 2020, Toscafund Asset Management announced that it had sealed a takeover which valued TalkTalk at £1.1 billion, taking it private.

Customers are also offered "Homesafe", a network-level online security and website blocking system that TalkTalk introduced in 2011.

[59] In January 2018, TalkTalk announced that it will exit the mobile provider space, and began offering its customers reaching the end of their contracts O2 deals instead.

[60] The TalkTalk brand was launched with a number of high-profile TV advertisements in 2003, featuring the former public face of BT, Maureen Lipman.

[62][63][64] In April 2024, Mark Heap was the lead in a series of radio advertisements for TalkTalk written and directed by Rich Johnston and produced by Radioville.

[67] In 2005 TalkTalk was accused of using the practice of telephone slamming (changing consumers' residential phone line over to a new provider without their consent).

[68] In November 2012 the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) publicly listed TalkTalk as one of a number of companies that it had concerns about due to unsolicited telephone calls for marketing.

[69] In early 2008 it was announced that TalkTalk had entered into an agreement (along with BT and Virgin Media) with the former spyware company Phorm to intercept and analyse their users' click-stream data, and sell the anonymised aggregate information as part of Phorm's OIX advertising service.

[78] They had significant service centres, inherited from AOL and Toucan, for UK customers based in Waterford and Sligo.