SKY VS Virginmedia

Sol00

Virgin without a doubt!

We moved from Virgin to Sky in Feb and we're regretting it already. Sky has all these channels but half the time there's nothing to watch and when that happened with VM, we had the choice of on-demand.

The other thing my mum's been moaning about is that Sky + has 2 tuners compared to V+'s 3 tuners.

spongerob500

Ok. So now im completely convinced Virgin is better, what deals do people have that are on Virgin (TV,BB,phone)? so i can try and haggle my way to a better deal. I pay 40 quid for M TV, L BB, and M phone. Has anyone got a V+ box for free?? Also, do you have to have a HD ready TV for it?

lilac_lady

Virgin doesn't charge for home visits to sort out problems. Does Sky have a callout charge?

donnac2558

spongerob500 wrote: »

Ok. So now im completely convinced Virgin is better, what deals do people have that are on Virgin (TV,BB,phone)? so i can try and haggle my way to a better deal. I pay 40 quid for M TV, L BB, and M phone. Has anyone got a V+ box for free?? Also, do you have to have a HD ready TV for it?

No, you can use it with a analogue TV, they will either leave the HD cable or post them out to you. When the time comes and you get an HD ready TV you just plug the cables in, the V+ will recognise you have HD and tell you to switch to the HD on settings.

LeeSouthEast

If I could get Virgin, I'd be with them. Sadly, I'm limited to Sky. But, they're OK I suppose. Nothing groundbreaking. They're expensive, the broadband is crap (but the wireless router was nice, which I kept and flashed to generic firmware!). So we're now with Sky for the TV (Sky+ ... buggy boxes, awful signal.. but that's a whole other post). TalkTalk for phone and broadband.

Iberian_Dragon

There is no right wrong option: it depends on what is available to you and what your priorities are.

Upwind

I'm currently with Sky for TV. I have Sky+ and am now on my 3rd box in less than 18 months. Trouble is that every time they send an engineer out invariably they tell you that the box is knackered and they replace it - which means you loose everything that you have saved. I also joined the Sky repair plan (at a cost of £9.00 a month! .....idiot!) which is Sky subcontract out to a company called Domestic and General. These guys are a joke and their guarantee that they will have an engineer 'on your doorstep' within 3 days is laughable - don't do it - just tell Sky that you will move to Virgin/NTL and they will probably send an engineer for free to come and fix it. I'm with Talk Talk for BB and telephone - and although they were average to start with they have (touch wood) been pretty good for the last 12 months.

DCFC79

Id say virgin, bigger hard drive to store recordings on, i would go for sky though if the internet from sky was faster or as fats as virgns but its not so virgin it is,

jmcdyre

Just stumbled on this thread while trying to find out what will happen to my Virgin package now that Setanta have lost their footie rights....

Regardless of that, we moved to virgin for BB and phone last year, have now added TV to the package for £40ish a month. I cancelled my sky tv subscription to get everything under the same bundle, mainly because I have never had BB that comes even close to Virgin in terms of general performance and speed, and hence VFM.

I miss the sky menu's, and their remote is better...but that's it. Oh and the phone only rings 4 times, to increase this I would have to pay!! (but only got the phone as it's part of the bundle - never use it).

Customer service wise, Virgin used to be diabolical back in the NTL days, so have been nicely surprised that they have managed to turn this round to such a massive extent. The few times I have had to call them I got through very quickly and the query was sorted very quickly - in contrast to sky who had appalling queue times and the generally bad service from foreign staff was almost as bad as Tiscali's!!

BexTech

I am a cable subscriber (used to be Sky subscriber and still use Sky box).

Sky is great for picture quality and reliability of signal and also for the number of channels, the boxes are pretty fast and pleasing to the eye.

We dumped Sky simply because after being with them from their first day of transmission they wanted us to pay the full asking price and cable was willing to do a deal and am now on a permanent retentions deal.

With cable the phone service is a rip-off (though not a problem for us as part of the retentions deal to keep us as previously only had broadband from them with free then starter TV was free install of phone line and extension, free line rental, free evening and weekend calls and free caller display, this on top of reduced price XL TV package, and reduced price broadband, with V+).

So for us is crazy not to remain with cable, even though it is often playing up with the slow dodgy V+, the signal problem you get no matter what the weather, only lost signal with satellite a couple of times since the mid 1980s and that was in extreme heavy rain.

Cable do come and fix faults for free, however you just tell Sky to cancel the lot because you aren't paying for a service you can't receive and after offering half-price fix will then offer free fix.

The VOD (when not playing up) is excellent on cable.

Cable broadband is excellent as long as you aren't in an over-subscribed area, though it wrongly advertised as fibre optic, it is in fact a fibre/coax hybrid, the cable into the home is co-ax, even ADSL uses fibre as its backbone.

If you want help with cable use the support newsgroups as phoning them is a nightmare, most the time you get some useless person on the phone and you end up pulling your hair out, being an ex-Birmingham cable customer, the customer services have gone down the toilet over the years.

I don't have voicemail on the phone as that is just a money making scam for the phone companies, and I have consideration for my callers.