Virgin Media: Haggle down your costs.

I have been following the chat about the Talk Talk deal but I am stuck with NTL as there has never been a BT line in this house (not strictly true actually as this was the Sales office but BT don't charge the developers, only the first person to buy the house!)

Anyway, I rang 0800 052 9403 the customer Relations number (option 2) and explained that I had seen the Talk Talk offer and wondered whether they (NTL) were intending to do any similiar offers. I also added that I am a broadband user with line rental and that I have been using the override numbers for all other calls, but I used to be on talk unlimited 24 as I am a heavy day time user.

Straight away, without any further effort on my part he offered me 2meg BB (shortly to be upgraded to 4Meg with no extra charge); line rental and talk unlimted 24 for a flat £20 per month indefinately. CHEAPER than Talk Talk AND BB instantly upgraded. This also saves on calls as I was using Call1899 at 1p/min! (and saves the fag of dialling the access number and listening to the nice lady before entering the number you really want!)

Go on, make that call. Good luck. :j

I tried it with Telewest last week. Phoned them up and told them I was considering moving to Talk Talk and enquired about how much notice I would have to give them, etc. I wasn't offered anything to stay, so I'm now seriously thinking about phoning up and giving them 30 days notice of cancelling my services.

I've been with them for 3 years and have phone, broadband and TV packages totalling £47 a month before I make any calls. I use call1899 for my calls as Telewest are too expensive. I've always found their services to be reliable, but they are just becoming too expensive now.

c_smith wrote:

I tried it with Telewest last week. Phoned them up and told them I was considering moving to Talk Talk and enquired about how much notice I would have to give them, etc. I wasn't offered anything to stay, so I'm now seriously thinking about phoning up and giving them 30 days notice of cancelling my services.

I was with Telewest and what I found was that rather than say I'm "considering" leaving just be firm like Edinburghlass has mentioned.

I rung up and selected the option to 'cancel' services and when they answered I just said can I give you my 1 months notice thank you. I said nothing at this point and waited for their response. On the two times I've done this - one for cancelling their linerental and the other for cancelling their TV.

I found that when I threatened to cancel the Telephone they said OK (they knew I was serious because the number portability dept of BT had been in touch with them) and my call to TW was to ensure that they had their 1month notice. About 2 weeks after this phonecall, I received a call from their retentions dept asking why we were leaving them and moving linerental to BT. Having told them about Call18866 (cheapest at the time) they said they knew about that but couldn't match that whatsoever and tried offering a few other things but I said no.

Now because I was cancelling the telephone, the price of the TV goes up by about £4 (i think) so I then rung them back and proceeded to cancel the TV saying that it was going to rise by £4 simply because I've decided to move telephone to BT and I could get Sky for cheaper (already had figures to hand). At this point they credited us £4 a month for a year and then reduced the cost of the second digibox from £15 to £9.50 to pricematch Sky's cost of a second digibox (I know Sky actually charge £10 for second digibox so don't know why they reduced it to £9.50 but I didn't argue).