Been with Virgin Media for 10 years now, but the service has been getting flakier and flakier, the cheeky ball bags keep sneaking the bill up too.

I do WFH these days, so its getting used, but its 50 quid a month!

Considering i need to maintain a working connection for my work, how do i change it?
If i ring them and tell them to shove it, do i risk them cutting me off there and then?
Do i need to have another agreement in place (and installed) first? and effectively run two lines for a month?
If i get that agreement in place i guess when i ring them up to disconnect it, they’ll offer me a stellar deal (not sure i want it though, as it would involve tieing in to them for another 18 months

Any recommendations for good broadband? don’t have TV or land line with VM, don’t feel the need for either.

If you find a new provider they will sort the switch out. They’ll set you up and tell the existing company. The actual switch does take time. I think they say 12 hours or something but in reality it’s usually an hour or so. Can you get by with a mobile connection for a day or less?

Any recommendations for good broadband? don’t have TV or land line with VM, don’t feel the need for either.

Had plusnet fibre for a number of years. Get good speeds around 70megawhatsits up and 16 down. Customer service is great. Obviously depends how close to your exchange you are and what the wires are like. We get our landline through them all though I don’t know why we pay fir it as it’s never used. Use freesat/Netflix for tv

Do you have a good 5g or even 4g phone connection you can use as a hotspot during any slip-ups in transition? My 5g hotspot on the phone is usually way faster than Virgin 100MB. There shouldn’t be slip-ups though.

As Nick says a new provider should sort it out for you. We are also with plusnet and have been with them in one way or another since we moved here 17 years ago and they have been spot on. Only looking to move on as we can now get FTTP and with 6 of us in the house that will be handy, it also means we can ditch the line rental. If it wasn’t for the fact that plusnet dont offer FTTP (maybe to try and push you to BT?) I’d not be looking to move.

You say Virgin – is that Virgin cable or Virgin DSL? If it’s cable it may take a while. I’ve just left Virgin for Plusnet, it took a month all told, with an awful lot of waiting on hold and general hassle. If I actually had a job it would have been quite difficult – I guess that’s what they are counting on. On the actual day of installation it took two different Openreach guys a total of about 6 hours to get a line in and working, then it was another 6 hours or so for Plusnet to sort their stuff out. I was kind of expecting this, so I didn’t actually cancel Virgin until the Plusnet service was up and running – at which point they rang up, offered to cut my price from £71 to £29, and deal with all the awkward conversations with Plusnet. I told them they’d had their chance and now I was so pissed off with them that I didn’t care what their price was, I wasn’t buying. Which is a bit cutting my nose off to spite my face, but I’d really had enough of them, and £29 isn’t that much less than I’m paying Plusnet.

I moved to Vodafone last year (from Plusnet)- guaranteed 55 MBPS for £23 including line rental (going up by 32p next month).

The switchover took place overnight – just plugged in the new router and had everything up and running by 7am.

are you on virgin’s own fibre or are you on their old ADSL service that they don’t offer to new customers?

If you’re on virgin fibre then moving to anything else will need a physical new openreach line installed (unless you have one from pre virgin days) and all the above advice about new providers sorting the switch out will not apply I believe. You’ll need to book the new supplier and then cancel virgin seperately. I wouldn’t cancel virgin until you have the new supplier set up and working.

FWIW I swap between NOW broadband and plusnet each year to take advantage of cashback and new customer offers. I usually end up paying around 15-18 quid net for 38mb ‘fibre’.

I’ve switched a couple of times and as others have said it’s no hassle as it’s pretty much all done for you

With people working from home now so routinely there seems to be a gap in the market for guaranteed seamless switchover. I suspect lots of people are doing doing their usual annual swap due to risk of loosing connection. A provider who guarantees no loss of service, perhaps through provision of a 4G router during transition, could do well.

We had exact same thing as OP Virgin media price rise took it to >£50pm. Found a deal though vodaphone(?) offering same level of service for £37 – called virgin and after an hour on the phone, they decided to match it…

Pain in the arse, but got there in the end.

Will no doubt have to do the same in 11 months time

yeah, ive done it a few times scruff, and its just a bit of a pain, watching it creep up each month to go and have to argue with them once a year.

We are on Virgin pipes and hardware, the phone line is in a different corner of the house, where a “telephone table” would go, and has “Post office” written on it, so i would anticipate needing a new Open reach line for sure.

Sounds like options are:
do the months overlap game, or
suck it up and go and sit on hold for an hour, in order to give VM another bollocking and hammer them back down to 30.

Thanks all!

I’ve been considering this too, but one thing concerns me: my existing email address with the ISP’s suffix has been my main email address for years – can I retain this email address somehow or would it cease to be?

can I retain this email address somehow or would it cease to be?

It depends entirely on your existing provider. Could be yes / yes but for a nominal fee / no chance. Virgin fall into the latter category, you get a month or two of grace before they shut it down.

Honestly though, I’d start migrating to a webmail provider regardless if I were you.