I currently have Sky fro TV, Plusnet for Phone /ISP stuff.

I have just noticed that my Sky ( which is just the basics) is costing 40 GBP a month
With the Plusnet that means 80 GBP in total.

I could leave as is, change Plusnet to Fibre and pay the same … but two year contract with Plusnet.
Or I could change to Virgin for around the same money – and seemingly much faster fibre optics 100Mbps vs 50 Mbps)

Some issues
1) I don’t like Murdochs empire and I honestly think – other than HD channels you don’t really get much for yo money
2) I do not want a sky bb/tv/phone package as the price always creeps up.
3) I could just go freest (I have a box somewhere – but I need to check out what you get. We use Netflix a lot, so loosing tattoo fixers is not going to be the end of the world.
4) Plumbing is already under floorboards for satellite
5) We are in a Virgin media area, it means I could get faster fibre internet, which as i work from home would be great. However, unless when the fit they will do it under floorboards, I am going to have wires exposed everywhere … and I don’t really know any Virgin Media users.

What is the Virgin Media service, support like, and what about the free content? How much more is BT sport? And I have tried google …. but you don’t really get an objective opinion….
Thanks

I had Virgin for 2 years. Sky for us works out significantly cheaper (I pay £40 odd all in, no movies or sports but most other channels. We have Netflix, and the Sky Box Sets section is good.

Virginia was dreadful, but I think we were unlucky – our postcode is served by a dodgy ‘node’ whatever that means. We had months of not being able to access broadband, and countless broken promises to fix.

In my experience, Virgin Media customer service is down there with N Power…just apathetic, bordering on rude.

We all hated the TiVo interface. You have to click so many times during navigation.

so, a vote for ‘anything but virgin’ here.

I just upgraded with Virgin Media on Friday and found their Customer Service to be excellent, they fixed the issue with one phone call (wrong DOCSIS setting on our line). They also matched PlusNet’s pricing for BB, which was nice as I phoned up to complain about a price hike, so they reduced our bill, froze it for 12 months and upped us to 50 Mb/s.

So we’ve gone from £35/month for 20Mb/s to £29/month for 50 Mb/s (plus a phone line we never use).

Had Virgin about 2 years ago when we lived in Edinburgh. Absolutely faultless, significantly cheaper than the alternatives, and the Tivo box was a revelation after previous Freeview rubbish.

I’d have Virgin Media again in a heartbeat.

Perhaps when things are going well, they are ok. Round here…despite it being a cabled street, virtually everyone has moved away.

I have Virgin cable for broadband – excellent reliability, free speed upgrades whenever, etc, but I can’t stand the interface on their TV box, so for TV I have Sky. the landline is BT but only ever used for 0800 outgoing calls and for ignoring incoming calls

we got shot of Virgin after 18 months of constant outages and shocking speeds – the “headline” speeds are good but the real speeds can fall to 1/10 (or less) of that most evenings. A quick check on their message boards suggests not much has changed in the interim:

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Speed/bd-p/Speed

BT worked out cheaper than Virgin with BT sport and BT Wifi thrown in free – I didn’t think the latter would be useful but I’ve actually landed up using it more than 4g data when out and about. Although the headline speed for BT is half that of Virgin we actually get the promised speed and touch wood have only had 1 outage in 3 years, and that was when someone drove a car into the nearest BT infinity street cabinet.

Been with Virgin (phone, fiber & TV) for several years & the service has been great with fast (50MB, about to be upgraded to 70MB) & unlimited fiber and the Tivo box is good (UI could do with an upgrade tho’).

We’ve had a few issues with their customer services but nothing terrible. They have put their prices up about 3 times in the last few years with another coming in in February but as we had 2 months left on our contract we cancelled (after reading the thread on here & wanting to cut our costs).

They gave us Sky sports & movies for free for 3 months over xmas & called back within a week of cancelling & reduced our monthly cost to £27 (down from £44), upgraded our phone line (anytime calls) & stated that the price would be held for 12 months & we’d face no disconnection/cancellation fees if we left within that 12 months.

Virgin were a bit maddening at first, problems porting a phone number over from BT. Perfect since then except for the regular price hikes.

We’re with Sky at the moment…TV only though as BT screwed up the fibre optic installation really badly, truly awful customer service experience with that rabble. Went back to VM for broadband.

Not much difference between Sky & VM for the TV experience except maybe the record 2 channels, watch a 3rd thing. We’ll go back to Virgin in April but I’m not looking forward to the TiVo…tried it once but returned it and had the HD box back, very ‘menu-ey’…

We have Virgin cable 70meg broadband (including a phone line we never use) and their TiVo box for the base TV package because we don’t watch much TV.

We have no issues with the broadband and have never had to use customer services.

However I have to echo what others say – we hate the front end on the TiVo. If we had an aerial fitted here, I’d chuck the virgin box in the cupboard and go back to using our BT youview box which we used in our old place.

They gave us Sky sports & movies for free for 3 months over xmas & called back within a week of cancelling & reduced our monthly cost to £27 (down from £44), upgraded our phone line (anytime calls) & stated that the price would be held for 12 months & we’d face no disconnection/cancellation fees if we left within that 12 months.

Impressive, much better than the deal we got! Might try again…

Virgin user here, have been for three or four years. The service is okay but I would echo what others have said about customer service. When you need to use them it’s an absolute nightmare.

The customer service team seems to be based in India or perhaps, the Philippines and speaking to them is like pulling teeth.

We haven’t had any outages in about 4 months but had a fortnight where it was dropping consistently. I was up early with one of the kids (5am) and the the internet was out. I phoned at 11am to complain and the customer service person told me it had only been off since 9:30. This spiraled into an argument where the CS person was basically calling me a liar.

Apparently it needs to be off for 8? hours before you get any sort of token refund which is mere pence.

Good when it works. Infuriating when it breaks, and they put the prices up every year without fail, despite assurances they won’t.

VM customer services advised us to reboot the HD box daily to avoid failed planned recordings.

I asked if they could send some around when we’re away on holiday.

The customer service team seems to be based in India or perhaps, the Philippines and speaking to them is like pulling teeth.

I spoke to them on Friday, all UK based….

footflaps

I spoke to them on Friday, all UK based….

The only time I’ve spoken to anyone UK based was when I was threatening to leave.

I’m still trying the fathom it myself, we’re moving soon and whilst haven’t decided on where yet everywhere seems to have fibre and cable, neither of which we can have here.

The big problem is channel choice, we really like Fox for Walking Dead and Atlantic for Game of Thrones which means Sky really, but there’s ‘Now TV’ which seems to have most things for £6 a month!

We are with VM and have found it almost faultless. We have had a couple of short outages in the last few years, but a couple of hours at most. Very rarely and network congestion. Price does up every few years, but that is no different to Sky. The TiVo box UI is in need of some rework, but to give VM credit, it is slowly improving. However the functionality is there and you can always use the app (Android in my case) to do the work.

(This is just to balance out the people who had a nightmare with VM).

We used to have Sky – took them 4 attempts to turn up and install – 3 Sky boxes before one worked and a useless customer services division. When we left one part of Sky tried to pay me money (63p) and another one claimed that we owed the a couple of hundred pounds, despite have a letter saying that our account was closed and that no further payments would be needed.

I love Virgin media, so easy to deal with. I have just renewed for Medium TV, 100 meg BB & phone line for £44pm.
I have literally just tested the BB speed & it was 100.68, at this time on a Sunday evening 😯

They gave us Sky sports & movies for free for 3 months over xmas & called back within a week of cancelling & reduced our monthly cost to £27 (down from £44), upgraded our phone line (anytime calls) & stated that the price would be held for 12 months & we’d face no disconnection/cancellation fees if we left within that 12 months.

Impressive, much better than the deal we got! Might try again…

Took a while on the phone but most of that was me going ‘No, we’re deadset on leaving as we can’t afford it’, ‘can you do any better?’, ‘hmmmmm’ & Lauren ‘checking with her boss’.

Don’t accept their 1st, 2nd or 3rd offers. I was told that their best offers were ‘only available today’ (really?) which made me think that Lauren was v keen to keep us with VM regardless.

In retrospect I should’ve asked if they could extent the free SKY trial..

thanks all …

2bit, and anyone else who’s used the cancellation threat. I presume you had a back up provider, or were you confident of negotiating the price you wanted?
And I’m n sure it’s in the t&c’s, but what’s the cut off period when you opt to cancel with VM?
We’re out of contract now but still with them. Without any negotiation they’ve offered to slightly lower costs and up BB speed, if we sign another 12 months.

We’ve just cancelled sky, and can’t get Virgin here.

We got a Humax freesat DVR that also dies Netflix, YouTube, iPlayer, 4od (or whatever it’s called now) and a bunch of others. We also upgraded to fibre broadband and took out bill down to £31 from £62.

We bought a now tv box for £15 with 3 months subscription to the entertainment package. It’s been watched a bit, but we will only get month passes when something good is on (Atlantic or Fox, but there is only one or two good shows on it per year)

The only thing I miss is putting discovery on in the background while doing other things. It’s surprising how many good channels are free, including HD ones.

VM here. Just got it installed 1 month ago. My main reason is the BB speed. I’m getting 207mb.. 😯

VM good for consolidating costs. Preferred Sky Box to Tivo though.
VM Customer services in Scotland are very nice (and much better than Sky CS), and try to help, but are in essence completely powerless to do anything other than apologise for their incompetent colleagues on the technical side. Their hands are tied.
VM engineers are a bunch of lazy, untidy, incompetent, ignorant fskwits who wouldn’t know a complete job if they had their noses rubbed in it.

VM here, have to echo the good experiences of the lot above. Have been with them since forever, rock solid internet with a few infrequent outages, usually sorted within a few hours. They will increase the price by 10% a year which is pretty f’n annoying, and they will give you a discount off your bill (in my cases a loyalty discount) which you’ll have to renew every year or 18 months.

When we jiggled our house around they were kind enough to send an engineer around to move the modem/router box from one room to another, done FoC, which was pretty cool of them

Same as others regarding the awful interface on the Virgin TiVo box.

*HOWEVER* the smart features on a TiVo box make up for the negatives (it will record things based on previous viewing habits if there is space to do so). Just last week we benefitted from this feature as a new series of Silent Witness had started (which we didn’t know about) so it recorded it for us.

Ex Virgin customer here. Changed to BT recently.
Virgin BB quicker, but the BT is closer to the advertised speed (so better value). Do I miss the quicker BB? I haven’t even noticed (no gaming or such).
BT has only freeview channels and BT sport, much cheaper and I haven’t missed anything.
The only thing I had with virgin that I do miss is the recording thingy, and even that wasn’t great.
Get to know kodi/couchtuner/netflix/prime/torrents and clear out the rest of the crap sky/virgin sell you.

Just changed to VM as couldn’t have a Sky dish in new flat. My experience is that Virgin is rubbish. The internet is supposed to be fast but in practice it feels no better than Sky copper wire and the service is up and down like a sailors trousers. The TiVo box is rubbish – very slow. The tv selection is rubbish (I suppose that depends on taste and package) and the availability of stuff on catch up is limited.

Maybe I’ve been unlucky, but I’d switch to Sky in a heartbeat.