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Virgin Media : Would you recommend it?
I have been a Sky customer since 1990 but am thinking of a change.
I currently have Sky HD with one extra box so pay for multiroom, I pay £75 per month
I have Internet with AOL and pay £25 per month for the Gold service and its shockingly slow
I have my landline with BT and we pay £15 line rental per month and our calls are normally around £20 per quarter.
For each quarter that's £365
I am looking at Virgin's VIP package which gives us all the TV channels we currently have with Sky (sports and movies), broadband plus landline. They are currently offer this at £49.50 per month for the first six and then £99 afterwards. There is a line rental of £15 per month but they want the first 12 up front for a reduced fee of £10 per month (one off fee of £120)
I like the sound of this as, based on the after six month charge, it would save £26 per quarter and I'd hopefully get a better broadband service, not have any landline call fees and have all the catch up services currently unavailable on Sky.
Am I missing anything and should I make the switch?
I currently have Sky HD with one extra box so pay for multiroom, I pay £75 per month
I have Internet with AOL and pay £25 per month for the Gold service and its shockingly slow
I have my landline with BT and we pay £15 line rental per month and our calls are normally around £20 per quarter.
For each quarter that's £365
I am looking at Virgin's VIP package which gives us all the TV channels we currently have with Sky (sports and movies), broadband plus landline. They are currently offer this at £49.50 per month for the first six and then £99 afterwards. There is a line rental of £15 per month but they want the first 12 up front for a reduced fee of £10 per month (one off fee of £120)
I like the sound of this as, based on the after six month charge, it would save £26 per quarter and I'd hopefully get a better broadband service, not have any landline call fees and have all the catch up services currently unavailable on Sky.
Am I missing anything and should I make the switch?
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Comments
If this is because you are taking a brand new phone line, asked them to wave it, its a deal breaker, as to get any decent deal u have to take a phoneline, so there is not much choice,
But see what sky offer, they may give you a better deal, although i'm told there broadband is not quite a quick, but unless you doing massive downloads or streaming, 20mb is more than enough
its worth shopping about got 1 quote from virgin ask sky and tell them what virgin offer and can they better it, and then go back to virgin, play one againts the other even if its a quid its still £12 in your pocket a year,
I myself have jacked to phone and tv from virgin in, and when i ask a sky rep they would put the phone line in for nothing? so i can be done!
remember they need new customers, and they will fight for you, the only thing to be careful of is contract terms, i think sky only do 12 months, virgin do upto 18 months last time i looked depending on the deal.
good luck and please place the deal you get on DS as these company's do lots and lots of deal;s but dont always offer them all,
Multi-room. 10.25
Line Rental . 14.50. (Pay in advance also available)
Unlimited BB. 7.50
Or Fibre BB. 20.00.
Just by switching phone and BB to Sky you would be saving.
My colleague told me about an offer Quidco have right now for Virgin but you need to be quick, only 2 days left.
£161.50 cashback, £60 credit on your Virgin account and 6 months half price (but full price phoneline) on all collections with free installation too, it is an 18 month contract though but that's still some deal.
Maybe speak to Sky too, you appear to be paying way, way too much for Phone and Broadband. Even if you are not in a Sky Network area and cannot get the £7.50 totally unlimited Broadband service it would be considerably cheaper than what you're paying now but it does come with a 40GB cap.
I switched but the other way around, we had terrible broadband problems with Virgin due to oversubscribing in our area but hopefully that wont be the case where you live so maybe do some research in the VM Help Forums.
Good luck.
http://www.quidco.com/virgin-media/
http://community.virginmedia.com/
What really appeals about Virgin is the catch up service, they also say if something goes wrong they'll put it right for free whereas Sky charge £65 guaranteed fix. I am on my third box at the moment so I've had to pay £130 already and I'm concerned that the current box is on its way out too
I think I will give Virgin a call and go from there.
It seems hit and miss with VM's broadband. I have no issues at all and can do 3 or 4 things at once on a 30MB connection with no problems - even at peak times.
For the OP it might be worth checking the USwitch site as they have a map of speedtest results on there for comparison in your area.
If you go through Quidco (as mentioned earlier), you'll be getting your £130 back plus some spare! Won't get that if you ring.
I always struggled to find anything to watch on on-demand/catchup, even when I was on TVXL. There's a LOT of reality TV stuff on there.
everything for just under £50 ( excluding line rental) cannot be matched by Sky
Plus they cant offer 100 mb BB
My advice.......Go with virgin
The Quidco offer seems a great deal. It literally takes a minute to register with them, get the cashback!
Out of interest why can't you get Catch Up on Sky, do you have an incompatible box?
Mind you if you're broadband is really slow I guess it wouldn't be ideal to use.
You've hit the nail on the head. AOL broadband in this area is dreadful.
Let me give you an example. I download a fair bit of music and if I connect to my AOL via Netgear router then it takes anywhere between 2and5 minutes to download ONE track, not an album, a track.
My wife has a broadband line into the house too that her work provides as she works from home a fair bit. If I connect to that which is thru BT then it takes seconds.
I must admit I've not tried the catch up service on Sky connecting to wireless router but given the speed of it then I really don't think it's worth it.
It's a shame your broadband is so slow as Catch Up on Sky for me is excellent. I have a rock solid 11mb connection and even HD programmes are available to watch in about 20 seconds, SD is available in under 5.
You clearly need a new broadband service!
If you're not in an area that can get superfast BB through the phoneline the one thing I'd caution you about is VM's tv package for HD is inferior to Sky's, for a start with your sports subscription you will only get Sky Sports 1 and 2 in HD.
If you can live with an inferior HD package for your tv VM do very good deals, the best deals come through their retentions department though rather than their sales department, I'm not quite sure how you'd get through to retentions as a new customer though
You probably mis-understood.
So this is not necessary.
i recommend virgin media for the fibre optic broadband and for the landline..but not for the cable tv..
right now i use sky+hd for tv,virgin media for fibre optic bb and bt for the land line..
Broadband is great, although had issues with online gameplay on fifa recently which is unfortunate.
on the whole Im glad were with virgin but will be dissapointed if we dont get BT sports subsidised because one of the best things is having free access to ESPN
I have no interest in Sports, didn't really care that ITV3 wasn't in HD (although it now is), wasn't too upset at the absence of Buy4God (or the many other awful missing channels), buy DVDs if I like a film (or pay on Demand) and use the Internet a lot for online gaming so it's always more than met my needs.
Originally it had the advantage of being able to use the BBC iPlayer, 4OD and ITV player directly through the TV (which was something I often use), but other suppliers are catching up with that now. It's odd to see the adverts on TV at the moment about the wonderful new system which means you can watch the iPlayer through the TV when I'm thinking "I've been doing that for years".
Whilst I have had a few technical issues over the years (mostly with outside boxes but once with my piece of kit) they have always been resolved painlessly (although sometimes it took a few days) and that's not cost me anything extra.
So it's whatever floats your boat, my brother gets his internet from Virgin but as a massive football fan uses Sky for his TV.