Sky,Virgin etc

[a_hartley304]

John i have tried many and always find myself going back to virgin customer service is sh*t but once you are up and running they are very good. And speed is spot on Large is the package i ended up with and it does the job just nice.

[JUDWAK]

same has above
i keep coming back to virgin
direct debit saves ya £1.50 too

[dieselboy]

I recommend sky. They have an offer on at the moment for all three for £18. You can even swap your BT landline over to them so you dont need to rent the copper from BT (after the change over) as BT rip you off.
Sky has good quality internet.

The only downside to sky I feel, is that the sky box is not skys. They sell it to you as part of the contract. If it goes faulty apparently the cost to repair it falls on you.

Watch out for "sky box insurance". This is money for nothing. We got a lot of these letters through the post after joining sky.
Now our 12 months if over, if the sky box goes faulty I will probably leave sky if they do not fix it at no cost. (I'll cross that when I come to it)

[John h]

Thanks very much for all your 'guidance' I suppose I had better wait a while seeing as I had a strop with 'customer service and the install team'

[Tallyman]

One thing to remember if you go with Sky is that their broadband still uses the old copper wire network at the moment, which will limit your download speed depending on how far you are from the exchange.

We used to be with Virgin but got fed up with them as we had a 2Mb service and were paying £18pm for it and they would not consider a fairer package, especially when they lost the Sky One channel.

Re-installed the BT line but went with Sky for the calls & broadband. However, although we were on the 8Mb service the line will only support about 5Mb max at the best and there are times when although the system shows are being connected it just loses the internet connection completely (presuming it's not our computer playing up).

So, before you finally decide, check how far you are from the exchange, as although Sky / BT are offering 20Mb service in some areas if you are too far from the exchange then you can't get the fastest service until your area is upgraded to the new BT fibre optic network (i.e. as Virgins).

[Albannach]

Virgin, absolutely no question, they are unbeatable at the moment.

[dieselboy]

Virgin, absolutely no question, they are unbeatable at the moment.

Except by Sky.

[John h]

Signed up with Virgin Media 6 months broadband free,free installation,free connection, tv,phone,bb £27 per month booked to install 08.30hrs 30th april ! still in shock !

[Sancho]

Totally agree with Predictable Bob.

The Virgin product is miles ahead of everyone else's (unless you want to go the whole hog with Sky+ HD and never leave the house again, partly through poverty). However, their customer service is absolutely diabolical. If you can get them to turn up and plug the thing in, it's good. Everything up to that is a total nightmare.

Personally, I use plusnet for phone and broadband and Freesat HD for telly, but I don't watch a great deal of TV and can deal with missing things/nothing being on.

[John h]

I have to say I gave their 'damage limitation' man aka customer service call back guy a really hard time and did explain that if no show then don't bother to call back,the local engineer lives in the next village and said there would be no problems, so its wait and see i guess? they turned up on time at son's house this morning all set up within the hour etc his cable should be in melt down by now all that porn etc...

[Calos]

Okies, if you get your broadband through your phone line go BT, if not then it's pretty changible.

Why ?

Ok BTWholesale now bt open reach own every exchange in the UK, they also own every broadband package.

The big problem with AOL etc is that they have very high contention.

What is contention?

That is how many other users your sharing you line with in simple terms.
Real life example is "my broad band is fine untill weekends evenings then it's nearly as bad a dial up." this is you sharing your link with upto 120 more times users than BT share you with.

With BT they allow basic users a 50/1 contention.

But they will not sell this product to any other provider at the price they sell it to their own customers.

So you can have 50/1 if you go for a business premium package from AOL; but at much more money per month. Otherwise your on a 240/1 from AOL or even as bad as 750/1 from SKY, it's not AOL or SKY's fault, it's that BT openreach have only agreed to sell that product to them.

Cable is another can of worms, but for cheap always fast BB go to the devil that's selling shoddy BB products to it's rivals and get the real deal.

peace
cal

[John h]

Using new fibre optic stuff just put into the village , at mo with BT best I can get is 2.4mb people across the road on Virgin 10mb deal get near max speed and a fantastic HD picture on tv, my aerial just about on it's last retaining bolt and struggles to point in the general direction of emley moor mast ! as I said I'll see if they turn up first !

[Rustinho]

Go for Virgin if you're likely to be staying in the same place for the length of the contract. We've had one or two hassles in terms of having to move from a cabled area to a non-cabled area which, given that we were tied into a contract, could've worked out a lot neater if we'd ended up moving about a month or so later cos the rules changed over certain things about 5 or 6 weeks after we'd moved!

My dad has been with the various prior incarnations of Virgin back to the days of Nynex/Telewest/etc and has never had the slightest problem with them - generally excellent service, turning up when arranged, polite and helpful on the phone (although queue times can be a pain sometimes) and in person.

If I had the chance I'd go back with Virgin cable TV cos in spite of problems since we moved to our new house due to being tied into a contract they've always provided excellent service at a reasonable price (if not the best price for what we get at the moment cos we're stuck on a BT landline).

Plus the recent OFCOM decision to force Sky to reduce wholesale prices to the likes of Virgin will definitely help. My guess is that Sky will be pinning their hopes on 3D TV taking off next year and selling the football/rugby/cricket to people for silly money.

[John h]

And finally ! got me Virgin package ! three men turned up yesterday, lots of 'you want the cable where ?' they had the tools etc but only rolled gravel over the cable in the front garden ? I thought they were supposed to trench it at a minimum depth ? Anybody know what the installation of cable specs are ? was a bit worried when I saw bare cable snaking under the shrubs and round the back of the rockery ?

[Scorpion]

Read here, John. It seems to vary a lot!

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s...d.php?t=425231