Moving from Virgin to Sky?

[Onelasttime]

Would I be mad?

Done to death, I know, but I want to play Virgin off against Sky due to the latest Virgin price hike, a deal coming to an end and I'm suddenly paying £70+ instead of the £50 odd I was paying previously.

The Sky deal for £33 a month for the basic Entertainment package is tempting (I don't need Sky Sports). However, Sky Fibre hasn't hit our area yet according to the online check so I'd be stuck with Sky Broadband with 'Estimated access line speed: 5.9-12.5 Mbps'. I will also need my old BT line reconnected.

Is this going to feel like a tortoise crossing a desert compared to my current Virgin VIVID 100 Optical Fibre?

Truth be told, I don't want to leave Virgin because I get BT Sports and will see Liverpool's Champions League games, which is an extra with Sky. But I don't want to roll over and take it from Virgin so I'm prepared to call their bluff if the Sky deal works. I'll be haggling with Virgin sometime this week but need to get the options straight.

Oh, and I don't have a rooftop TV aerial, so no Freeview option unless I pay £200 to have an aerial installed.

Any advice or experience welcome

[Hood]

Would I be mad?

Done to death, I know, but I want to play Virgin off against Sky due to the latest Virgin price hike, a deal coming to an end and I'm suddenly paying £70+ instead of the £50 odd I was paying previously.

The Sky deal for £33 a month for the basic Entertainment package is tempting (I don't need Sky Sports). However, Sky Fibre hasn't hit our area yet according to the online check so I'd be stuck with Sky Broadband with 'Estimated access line speed: 5.9-12.5 Mbps'. I will also need my old BT line reconnected.

Is this going to feel like a tortoise crossing a desert compared to my current Virgin VIVID 100 Optical Fibre?

Truth be told, I don't want to leave Virgin because I get BT Sports and will see Liverpool's Champions League games, which is an extra with Sky. But I don't want to roll over and take it from Virgin so I'm prepared to call their bluff if the Sky deal works. I'll be haggling with Virgin sometime this week but need to get the options straight.

Oh, and I don't have a rooftop TV aerial, so no Freeview option unless I pay £200 to have an aerial installed.

Any advice or experience welcome

I had a revolt on my hands from the kids when I was ditching the Virgin fibre broadband for sky as it was so slow.
Went the middle ground and got BT broadband which is ok.

[Mick P]

Giving up Virgin fibre broadband is like going back to to cars from the 1950's. Like it or not Virgins service is pretty good and most people around me are on at least 100 MByt and you are unlikely to get that from a competitor at a similar price. Anyone who willingly goes back to a BT connection needs their head testing.

If you have got the full package of TV, computer and landline, the price quoted is perfectly reasonable.

Either cough up and stick with Virgin or basically downgrade.

[reggie747]

I went the other way, I'd not go back. Sky broadband was pants mate...

[Onelasttime]

I went the other way, I'd not go back. Sky broadband was pants mate...

That settles it then.

I'll give Virgin the usual guff about leaving and then pray they offer me a new deal

[Tony]

Giving up Virgin fibre broadband is like going back to to cars from the 1950's. Like it or not Virgins service is pretty good and most people around me are on at least 100 MByt and you are unlikely to get that from a competitor at a similar price.

And don't they know it. This is how they have the vast majority of their customers - including me - over a barrel.

[Gerald Genta]

I considered leaving Virgin and going to BT. Called to cancel and they did reduce my package back to what I was originally paying. Still cancelled anyway and got BT set up in my house realised it was awful so went back to Virgin and they made me an even better offer! Worth seeing what they will do once you've said you want to cancel.

[Nigel306]

As for the rooftop aerial, stick it in the loft.
We had an outdoor one that pigeons loved to sit on and leave deposits beneath it, so I took it down.
I just bought a new aerial and lay it in the loft in the general direction of the transmitter (phone app shows where to aim it), and it gives a perfect picture on TV.

[nick wood]

Thinking of doing the same: we had sky fibre and it was dreadful; like using dial up.on the old aol I used to have so do not go for that

Any offers out there for new sky customers??
And I am with by and it's consistent at over 75mps

[justin44]

I had sky 7 years ago and the broadband was crazy they just couldn’t get it working reliably, so I went to virgin. Year on year the price seemed to go up and I just sucked it up, then the virgin box got slower so I asked if they could upgrade my two boxes, they wanted £80 despite the fact I’d had nothing new for 6 years. So I bit the bullet cancelled the lot and went to sky, the day sky came to do the install I remembered why I left them the engineer couldn’t get the broadband working, luckily I still had a cross over of Virgin broadband for a few weeks. I ended up cancelling sky after two days and going back to virgin, sky still made me pay a months charge even though I couldn’t use the service but for that they installed a dish and I had two guys visit to install it.

But virgin had me over a barrel and they knew it, price went up.

[Mick P]

But virgin had me over a barrel and they knew it, price went up.

Yes that is the current state of the market, Virgin have progressed well over the last few years.

The only good news must be that other competitors will benchmark their procedures and hopefully catch up and that will put a pressure on prices.

I think the main danger is that more people are using the internet to control burglar alarms, lighting and heating etc all of which makes greater demands on broadband reliability. Therefore non fibre supply is going to lose out very quickly which will make Virgin even more dominant.

[Onelasttime]

Did the "I'm leaving" thing and got a 6-month contract for £53 per month, which I believe is the current newbie offer. This is the XL package so I've got what I want.

I can do it all again in 6 months' time

[dkpw]

Did the "I'm leaving" thing and got a 6-month contract for £53 per month, which I believe is the current newbie offer. This is the XL package so I've got what I want.

I can do it all again in 6 months' time

Great minds think alike. This thread had prompted me to check my account with VM, as did another price hike.

Before I called VM, I checked my local OpenReach Fibre opportunities: "Your area is currently in our plans to be upgraded with Fibre to the Premises (FTTP), however we follow a different design and build process for FTTP so you won't see updates at each stage. Once the engineering work is completed there is a commissioning period of up to eight weeks before an order can be placed. When you are able to place an order you will see the Accepting Orders message."

I translated that as; "We're ages behind VM and are so bureaucratic, that you will have lost all interest before we can supply you with this service."

So after 20 minutes on the phone, I obtained a 6 month discount, x2 speed increase, a new router (no shipping fees - gee thanks) and saving £10 a month.

Inertia costs money.

[wombleh]

We did it, largely due to Virgin being so unreliable here.

IMO as a networking guy there is a lot of marketing around bandwidth numbers, the difference in internet access between 30Mbps and 100Mbps is not really noticeable for the majority of what home users do. A webpage will open so quickly at either speed that the DNS lookups will take far longer. HD Netflix uses about 5Mbps and your average web browsing session uses very little. IoT devices use absolutely naff all bandwidth, could be measured in kilobits per hour, unless they've been hacked and are spamming someone.

Some stuff like gaming or VoIP is latency sensitive so can suffer on smaller links, but most modern routers can do prioritisation to sort that out. There are plenty now being marketed as "gaming routers" which will probably do it automatically.

[dkpw]

We did it, largely due to Virgin being so unreliable here.

IMO as a networking guy there is a lot of marketing around bandwidth numbers, the difference in internet access between 30Mbps and 100Mbps is not really noticeable for the majority of what home users do. A webpage will open so quickly at either speed that the DNS lookups will take far longer. HD Netflix uses about 5Mbps and your average web browsing session uses very little. IoT devices use absolutely naff all bandwidth, could be measured in kilobits per hour, unless they've been hacked and are spamming someone.

Some stuff like gaming or VoIP is latency sensitive so can suffer on smaller links, but most modern routers can do prioritisation to sort that out. There are plenty now being marketed as "gaming routers" which will probably do it automatically.

An attraction of my new deal was increased upload speeds, as I regularly need to transfer 25Gb of FileMaker backups to off-site storage for a client. I'm hoping to be able to do that in half the time.

[dkpw]

After an hour of reconfiguring my network and devices, the new router seems to have done the trick.

Before:


After:


A noticeable improvement.

[Mathif]

Be careful what router youre given some of them are absolute crap like the one virgin have recently. With response time over 100ms... average


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[Estoril-5]

After an hour of reconfiguring my network and devices, the new router seems to have done the trick.

Before:


After:


A noticeable improvement.

How/what did you do to reconfigure your network/devices?

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