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Opinions on Virgin Media.


billy2shots
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Every month Virgin Media send me offers through the post and every month they get more tempting. Last month they sent a "sky switcher offer", the offer consisted of the following.

V+ HD box (sky plus HD)

Second HD box for another room (sky multi room)

TV XL package (All channels which includes ESPN. Not movies or sky sports)

M Phone package (free weekend calls to landlines and virgin mobiles)

Free servicing and fixing for life of policy

All installed and set up for free.

£24.50 per month.

I was tempted, but when I called and added 10mg broadband and sky sports and added line rental, the total came to £78.

This month the offer is slightly better and comes in at £72 per month. Thats for line rental, broadband, xl pack with ESPN and sky sports pack.

It works out to £4 per month and im pretty tempted.

Plus points.

I will gain an extra HD box for the bedroom.

My current sky broadband up to 20mg but I only get just over 2mg. With virgin I should get 8mg.

I gain ESPN

All my bills are in one place. At the moment my phone is with BT.

BBC Iplayer and all the catch up ITV,4od etc are on the TV rather than tinternet.

Negative points

£4 extra a month

I will lose Sky Atlantic (Game of Thones, Sopranos etc)

Hassle of switching to an unknown provider.

My question to you then is. Has anyone got virgin media and what do you think of it and the service.

Anyone think of some negatives that I cant think of?

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This month the offer is slightly better and comes in at £72 per month. Thats for line rental, broadband, xl pack with ESPN and sky sports pack.

It works out to £4 per month and im pretty tempted

What is the post intro rate, intro rates tend to be for 3 or 6 months NEVER the lifetime of contract !

Plus points.

I will gain an extra HD box for the bedroom.

My current sky broadband up to 20mg but I only get just over 2mg. With virgin I should get 8mg.

I gain ESPN

All my bills are in one place. At the moment my phone is with BT.

BBC Iplayer and all the catch up ITV,4od etc are on the TV rather than tinternet

With Virgin, unless via a BT line, you will get 10Mb as the base b/b service, not 4 /5 /8 etc- if fed via direct Virgin cable the service is 100%, and seldom any issues.

Negative points

£4 extra a month

I will lose Sky Atlantic (Game of Thones, Sopranos etc)

Hassle of switching to an unknown provider.

My question to you then is. Has anyone got virgin media and what do you think of it and the service.

Anyone think of some negatives that I cant think of?

Service is fine, they are as sh1te as the rest if anything fails.

The line charges add up, so pay £2 extra for 0845 and 0870 bundle (250 minutes a month FOC for the £2).

Virgin won't give you HD Sky movies or sports, even if you have HD boxes, movies + sports package, the HD stuff is an extra couple of squid which is irritating.

I just toned down ours, 30 Mb b/b, 2 x HD+ boxes with XL TV, XL phone + £2 for the 0870 /0845 stuff and that runs to £67 per month fixed (no intro rate for 3 / 6 months).

The iplayer (and ITV / C4 varients) work fine, and the back 7 days on demand is good.

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The internet side of things is for the most part very good. When it works then it works well but when it breaks you're pretty much stuffed - I've been having problems for 4 months now and all VM are doing is sending engineers around to check the power levels at the modem. Stupid really as they can see the power levels are fine without having to send someone out.

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The internet side of things is for the most part very good. When it works then it works well but when it breaks you're pretty much stuffed - I've been having problems for 4 months now and all VM are doing is sending engineers around to check the power levels at the modem. Stupid really as they can see the power levels are fine without having to send someone out.

Agreed; it fine when it works and as soon as something fails you are proper funked; Have an on-going promlem for 2 weeks now grrrrrrrrr

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What is the post intro rate, intro rates tend to be for 3 or 6 months NEVER the lifetime of contract !

With Virgin, unless via a BT line, you will get 10Mb as the base b/b service, not 4 /5 /8 etc- if fed via direct Virgin cable the service is 100%, and seldom any issues.

Service is fine, they are as sh1te as the rest if anything fails.

The line charges add up, so pay £2 extra for 0845 and 0870 bundle (250 minutes a month FOC for the £2).

Virgin won't give you HD Sky movies or sports, even if you have HD boxes, movies + sports package, the HD stuff is an extra couple of squid which is irritating.

I just toned down ours, 30 Mb b/b, 2 x HD+ boxes with XL TV, XL phone + £2 for the 0870 /0845 stuff and that runs to £67 per month fixed (no intro rate for 3 / 6 months).

The iplayer (and ITV / C4 varients) work fine, and the back 7 days on demand is good.

No intro rate, for the same price you can get the 30mg bb but after 6 months that shoots up. My bb with sky (by line) is crap, slow and is forever dropping out. Surely the 10mg is not guaranteed? Even if I get 7 or 8 mg it would be 3 x faster than I get now.

My tv has built in free sat so I wouldn't be gaining many extra hd channels but I would be good to have a free second box with no monthly cost.

If they had sky Atlantic it would be a no brainer, trouble is half my planner if filled with programs from that channel. I wonder if I can watch it on my dads sky player. Can't watch movies as it knows I'm not at his house on the registered computer but you can watch other channels from a different computer.

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I was with Telewest BB back in 2002 and then they got bought out by Virgin and the service has been spot on for the most part. Has to be said that the quality of the connection has gone down over the past 3 years with regards to down time becoming more frequent. Maybe 4 times a year for a couple of days min in my area.

As others have said they just keep sending out engineers to look for the issue and still are no wiser as to what the problem is. In saying that though they do not charge you for any down time if you raise it with them.

After all that though they are the best of the bunch for me with regards to ISP's. I'm on the 10MB connection at on the speed tests im getting 9.6 about 99% of the time though that could be due to my location near a hub.

Their tv service although good is not as good as sky with regards to the user interface. The software is slow and clunky compared to the sky when flicking through the menus or the channels etc. Really drives me up the bend but if you can live with that then its a no brainer when you take into consideration the ISP side of things.

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We have the Virgin 50mb service and telephone.

We don't use Virgin TV even though there are savings to be had if we did.

Our situation is slightly different though in that we've got a 4 room Sky HD installation and we've never had any cause to fault Sky. We now pay £102 a month and get pretty much every channel possible including ESPN Premiership matches, MUTV etc. On the two occasions (possibly 3) I have looked to move to Virgin I've found that their packages can't match what Sky do channel for channel -or- last time when I looked (before we moved house recently) they could almost match the channel package but the price was only going to save me £25 a month.

Whilst that saving isn't insignificant, it meant the hassle of cancelling the Sky multi-room for an entertainment package that is exactly what we wanted and having Virgin install a system we would be completely unused to - and then the risks of whether they fecked it up or not. In the end I decided if it wasn't broken...why try to fix it. We get everything we want from Sky and everyone is happy as larry with it. We know the costs and Virgin can't offer something dramatically better on price without it being a slightly less package - so we've stuck with this.

There is another side of it too of course - if something goes wrong with Sky, we've lost Sky (never happened mind). If something goes wrong with Virgin, we've lost Virgin but we've still got TV. So, it is also a case of putting all our eggs in our basket - or not as we've decided to do.

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Their tv service although good is not as good as sky with regards to the user interface. The software is slow and clunky compared to the sky when flicking through the menus or the channels etc.

Whilst in general I agree with that, our Sky+ HD box is incredibly slow and annoying sometimes, and can take ages to respond, it really winds me up when you press a button, and nothing happens, so you press it again, and then it responds twice.

Even the banner slows down and scrolls jerkily/freezes sometimes, and even just pressing the channel + button, sometimes it doesn't actually change for 5 seconds or so.

Shame because otherwise, the sky epg is very good, although I still miss autoview from the old boxes.

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Whilst in general I agree with that, our Sky+ HD box is incredibly slow and annoying sometimes, and can take ages to respond, it really winds me up when you press a button, and nothing happens, so you press it again, and then it responds twice.

Even the banner slows down and scrolls jerkily/freezes sometimes, and even just pressing the channel + button, sometimes it doesn't actually change for 5 seconds or so.

Shame because otherwise, the sky epg is very good, although I still miss autoview from the old boxes.

I'd echo all of that. Sometimes it the delays can be very annoying.

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  • 5 years later...

Sorry for the 5 year bump....

 

Thinking of swapping to Virgin again. Still currently with Sky for everything. It would mean a like for like switch apart from- 

Gaining faster Broadband 
Gaining BT Sport (the reason i'm looking to change)
Gaining free voice mail (currently turned off to save a couple of quid)

Losing Sky Atlantic. GoT is the only thing I really watch on it anyway and the final season is not out for a while.

 

Once all the Sky Sports channels have been wound up to HD and all one off costs paid, it will result in a £317 saving for the first year and then  the same amount i'm currently paying give or take a few pence. On paper it looks obvious but it's the ball ache of sorting it all out.

Very impressed with  Virgins online tailoring service, works out a lot cheaper than their standard packages/bundles.

Any feedback or suggestions peeps?

Edited by billy2shots
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We watch very little Sky now so I've canned it (well, I haven't but I have canned the movies and sports elements very recently).

I now use Now TV for the matches/sports I want to watch - and it is and will continue to us save a lot of money.  We then have Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and access to a Plex service (oh and this is edited to add that I have BT Sport too).

However, I rate Virgin highly nowadays for one reason and that is since their Virgin Vivid service was launched.

This is why.  I don't think I need to say anything else.  That reading was taken minutes ago.

 

5522317964.png

Edited by NewNiceMrMe
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We had Virgin Media at our old house with a TiVo & 100Mbps internet.  We would stil be a VM customer but can't get Virgin at our new house so we have Sky HD and BT Infinity.

I prefer the TiVo over the Sky HD box and the VM Internet over BT Internet.

If I could get VM here I'd switch.

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We can't get anything Virgin here, so we're limited to either Sky or BT (realistically, I wouldn't consider Talk Talk a rival).

 

We have Sky Q and it's very impressive, particularly the fact it's multi room with no ongoing costs, I couldn't go back to a Sky+HD box now, they feel like a fisher price toy in comparison, that said, Sky Q does have it's flaws although they are slowly being sorted with firmware updates, for example I noticed the other night if you watch an on demand series, it now automatically downloads the next episode without you having to do anything, and it'll auto play the next episode Netflix style too, little touches but they work well.

 

There are still things that they could improve, the TV guide, the catch up service and the on demand stuff are all a bit disjointed, on the BT vision YouView box we had before, it was all much more cohesive and more intuitive to navigate, simply being able to scroll backwards in time through the planner to find something you've missed is a brilliant feature I really miss from the BT box.

 

As for Top Picks, I really don't know what the point of this is or why Sky insist on it being the default menu option when you press 'home' instead of it defaulting to TV Guide, it's crap.

 

Sky broadband is utter garbage though, will be switching that back to BT infinity as soon as the Sky contract is up.

Edited by Tipex
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Ive said it before, I'm no IT expert but.....

Isn't BT Infinity and Sky (fibre) the same thing? Sky use all the cables, boxes in the street etc provided by BT and the only difference is the router inside your home??

The features of the next episode downloading automatically is on the normal Sky HD as well. There was an update last month and now mine automatically downloads the next 2 episodes of the boxset. I like that feature. 

On the subject of watching in another room on Sky Q. Can you only watch what channel the box has on. Meaning the same channel is in in both rooms?. If that's right then it's not a particularly good feature and even if you can watch 2 different things it would still be cheaper to have normal HD and pay for a second box. I really don't get Sky Q at all. 

Edited by billy2shots
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18 minutes ago, billy2shots said:

Ive said it before, I'm no IT expert but.....

Isn't BT Infinity and Sky (fibre) the same thing? Sky use all the cables, boxes in the street etc provided by BT and the only difference is the router inside your home??

Sort of, yes.  The cable between your property and the cabinet will be the same irrespective of which ISP you use but where the traffic goes once it hits the BT exchange can vary significantly.  Most ISPs will backhaul using BT's network whilst some of the larger ones will have their own connections into the BT exchange.  So if the BT network otu of that exchange is congested then you can potentially see an improvement from moving to another ISP if they've got their own connectivity.

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1 hour ago, billy2shots said:

Ive said it before, I'm no IT expert but.....

Isn't BT Infinity and Sky (fibre) the same thing? Sky use all the cables, boxes in the street etc provided by BT and the only difference is the router inside your home??

The features of the next episode downloading automatically is on the normal Sky HD as well. There was an update last month and now mine automatically downloads the next 2 episodes of the boxset. I like that feature. 

On the subject of watching in another room on Sky Q. Can you only watch what channel the box has on. Meaning the same channel is in in both rooms?. If that's right then it's not a particularly good feature and even if you can watch 2 different things it would still be cheaper to have normal HD and pay for a second box. I really don't get Sky Q at all. 

I had Sky Q installed yesterday. Impressed so far!

You can watch one channel on one tv and a different one on the other tv. You can pair two ipad / tablet devices to it and they too can watch anything inside the house independently of the televisions.

The one downside for me (and I might not have figured this out yet) is how to see what is on other channels easily without changing the channel or going to the tv guide. With my sky HD box I could use the arrow keys to scroll up or down channels and left and right for earlier and later without changing channel. It only seems to want to let me see what is on the channel that I was last watching at the bottom of the screen.

Edit: They wanted £149 installation fee which I got them to reduce to £60 and they also wanted £12 per month more than I am currently paying but I also got them to waive this so I am paying the same for a better system with multiroom.

Edited by Booster
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If you press the 'right' arrow key, or swipe right on the posh remote it will show you the last channel you were watching, so you can switch back and forth.

 

If you press the circle or click the touchpad (on the posh remote) it brings up the info for what you are watching, you can then scroll (or swipe) up/down left/right to flick through to other channels/times and the little picture in picture box shows a live preview of that channel (on the main Q box, only a static image on the mini Q boxes), if you chose to then select that channel, it changes instantly with no black screen.

 

Multiroom really is on a different level, the main box has 12 tuners, so you can watch any channel in any room independently of whatever is being watched or recorded in any other room.

 

Theoretically, you can record 4 channels in the main room while watching another, at the same time, up to three mini boxes in other rooms can also be watching any channel while recording another and you can be streaming live channels to two iPads at the same time.

 

Recordings can be set or watched by any of the boxes regardless of which one you are using.

Edited by Tipex
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On 8/2/2016 at 3:13 PM, burble said:

We had Virgin Media at our old house with a TiVo & 100Mbps internet.  We would stil be a VM customer but can't get Virgin at our new house so we have Sky HD and BT Infinity.

I prefer the TiVo over the Sky HD box and the VM Internet over BT Internet.

If I could get VM here I'd switch.

Same here, I've had to go from 200Mb Virgin cable down to about 20Mb with Sky fibre.  I even got Virgin to send someone to survey the area but they said there's no chance of getting cable to my house :(

I didn't really like the TiVo box, I found it a bit clunky.  I have Sky+ HD with an extra box now.  I would have liked Q but it would have been another £40 a month or so and I couldn't see much benefit other than the new UI.  Have they got Powerline networking going yet for the extra boxes?

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