Hoping someone might know before I send 20mins on the phone….

I have broadband/tv & phone line through virgin. The phone line is never used, costs £13.90 a month, got it as I thought I had to to get internet.

However reading their recent marketing gumpf it says the broadband comes via fibre optic cables instead of the phone line.

Does this mean I can ditch the landline and save myself some cash?

don’t need the phone for bb

may be a better package with it though

As he ^ says. Check the costs as it might save you nowt/very little.

Yep, I did it. No more line rental.

Looks like it’s worth giving them a call – thanks

indeed. I’ve just gone through this after moving house recently.

I think if you went for BB only you’d still need a landline from another supplier. The fibre optic only goes down the street -its not what gets piped into the house (i think).
whatever you do, dont go back to BT is my advice. terrible service.

If you do decide to go landline only, bethere do cheaper than BT.

i’m with Virgin and dont have a landline now. I didn’t save much to be honest.

DenDennis – Member
I think if you went for BB only you’d still need a landline from another supplier. The fibre optic only goes down the street -its not what gets piped into the house

Nope – all content comes down the fibre.

I’ve got Virgin broadband. The fibre optic cable does come into the house, there’s a (for want of a better description) kind of modem kind of thing, which then has a CAT5 cable going to the router.

Sky HD so we need a landline for the odd occasion when we buy a film on Box Office, or when there’s a firmware update. But we hardly use it, we both get so many minutes & texts with the mobile contracts

i must say that changing from Virgin service so far has really impressed me. o2 were ok until I moved house, BT before it were just shocking.

ah, must be just my area, with the old NTL boxes that dont do fibre optic in direct… thats what the chat bot told me

Unless I’m much mistaken, Virgin is fibre to the street cabinet, and then coax cable to the home. The new BT Infinity service is also fibre to the cabinet, but twisted pair to the home (unless it’s a new build, or trial area, in which case you may get fibre to the home).

With Virgin, everything comes down the coax cable – phone, internet, TV using a system called DOCSIS. The latest version of DOCSIS can support very high speeds – coax is somewhat better than twisted pair at supporting high speeds.

Edit: Generally, Virgin is very reliable, except when you have a problem, in which case they are somewhat understaffed. After 8 years of pretty perfect service, this week they decided to switch off my broadband. Small change in the provision, and because I have an old box, they won’t support it any more. Reported Monday, engineer Friday.

Not many areas have fibre to the home, it’s generally copper coax cable to a box in the street, then fibre, but the point is all virgin media broadband is on a dedicated line, not using a BT or ex-BT phone line. So no need for extra line rental. That said, we added a phone for not much, then got basic cable TV included for nothing. Customer service is horrendous as soon as anything other than a common problem happens though – we’ve just moved and it took us 2 weeks to persuade them of that because the previous tenants were a bit slow cancelling the contract. They seemed to think we hadn’t actually moved, but were just transferring our services to someone else’s house for a joke.

Edit: yeah, what he ^ said. But we did at least get shiny new kit when we moved 🙂

You can ditch the phone line if you have cable. Problem is it usually makes up part of the package pricing and dropping it makes little difference to the overall price. And it can be handy to have a landline now & again. Ring Virgin up and see if they can do you a deal. As folks have said, Virgin cable is fibre to the street box and coax to the house.

just gone the whole hog with virgin, impressed with how they sorted everything etc, impressed with the ervice. Wasnt fussed about having the phone but it only worked out at £3 a month or something daft.

Anyone use the Tivo box? Apparently it’ll cost me £50 setup and then £3 a month…

wonder if virgin sell bikes yet….

@DT78 We’ve had the tivo box for a few months now. It’s very good – records suggestions for you, has three tuners to record on, good on-demand service.
If you search the net you might see a lot of negative reviews but there was a software upgrade last week which has sorted out nearly all the issues.
Go for it.