Virgin Media: Haggle down your costs.

*Kat*

Whens' the best time to call Virgin? My boyfriend has an account with them and we need to move it to our new house and hopefully haggle for a better deal, but he can't understand what the people (presumably India?) are saying, so he needs the UK number. I tried but they said cause the accounts in his name they wont let me do anything lol.

Is it better for me to be a new user and move? Or try and haggle? Our current one is rubbish.

We get:
TV L - £12.75
Broadband L - £25.25
Broadband and TV discount - £7

JeffMinter

Is there any way of just subscribing to broadband? I'm on benefits atm, it costs £13.90 line rental + broadband - the latter being more essential for jobsearching than the phone, which I barely use. I'm looking at the BT landline deals which are far cheaper, or better yet - the BT Basic tariff for no income people. But me being on cable has limited my options completely.

MrsA27

I would appreciate some pointers too if anyone has successfully haggled to lower their bundle for broadband (L) + phone (M) + TV (M) bundle. We have been with VM for almost 3 years now and I have tried in the past to get cheaper deals quoting their offers for new customers and Sky's offers with no luck. The bundle cost us £25 per month 2 years ago and it has now gone up to £29.90.

I have considered getting a Freeview + box with a one off price of about £160, then subscribe to a lower broadband + line rental bundle. So far, it seems like Primus has the best broadband + line rental deal at £13.99, with 20gb download limit and free weekend and evening deal. Dividing the cost of buying a Freeview + box by 12 months, this makes the monthly cost of having basic TV channels + broadband + phone line slightly less than £29.90, I save a little bit less than £30 a year. My only concern is the stability of Primus' broadband and if we accidentally going over the download limit we will be charged £2/gb, we currently have unlimited download with VM and fibre optic internet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

paulneale_2

MrsA27 wrote: »

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hello! 2 things about Non-fibre BB: 1) At peak times it will feel much slower than fibre, no matter who the supplier or how much it costs 2) If you just browse web pages and email you'll get used to it fairly quickly.

Have you considered checking if you can get a "value" fibre connection where you live? PlusNet offer a good compromise, but as with non-fibre low price deals, they won't suit everyone:

If you have a teenager in the house, they will be hammering your connection and you may not even know it right now (thanks to how robust a good fibre connection is) -so a "cheap" £6 copper (ADSL) broadband will soon either grind to a halt or you'll have to "upgrade" your way out, quickly negating any of the savings you may have achieved by switching.

If you're serious about saving money, and you don't have kids downloading the whole of the Internet everyday, a switch to Primus / PlusNet won't hurt at all -plus if you only want evening & weekend calls you can pre-pay your line rental for the year and save even more.

BT owns PlusNet these days, so they're not quite as cheap as they used to be -I'd plan for Primus.

If you then call Virgin to cancel (not to barter), you'll soon be handed over to the loyalty / retentions team who will be more than happy to try and persuade you to stay. Stick to your guns, ("Happy customer, but it's a financial decision I'm afraid...") and see what they come up with. You can always "think about it" and not go through with the cancellation if you're tempted!

Good luck & let us know how you get on...

tashmatthews

Anyone help

With VM, got m broadband and m phone package for £22 per month

I can't have tv as they don't do that in my area as of yet, am with Sky for tv

Any help appreciated

sameerpawar

I recently got virgin media £34 contract for medium tv, 10mbps broadband and useless phone. My cooling off period is till 13th April. Broadband is terribly slow and TV channels are mostly free to air. Unfortunately no sky allowed in my premises. I called disconnection team to get something extra by threatening to disconnect..but couldn't get anything..instead he was fine for arranging a disconnection from tomorrow morning. any suggestions? I am thinking going to only broadband for £22 and use freeview instead.

LemonSocks

We were paying £42-something set to hike up the extra 2 pounds line rental for medium TV, 20mb & medium phone. We've been with them for 19 months in this property (8 in the prior property) but we'd yet to get our free upgrade to 30mb & a V+ box.

The OH phoned up & the package is pretty much the same (but with 30mb) but we now have a Tivo box (free installation) & it's costing us £34.90. I noticed that putting together the same package under the current promotion puts it as £43.90 so we're happy enough with that. We might have been able to get a little more for our money but as it stands it saves us an extra £120 pa which we would have been paying if we hadn't called & I never miss a show, film, anything.

Lady_K

Daughters currently got this deal for approx £45 a month but she would like to upgrade the tv to the one you can record programs on like sky+. How can she go about getting this at a lower cost?

24/7 Phone
basic tv
lowest bb

Heinz

I know nothing about Virgin but, IMHO, £45 for that is very expensive.

manulike

For those of you who rarely use the land line, or use it mainly to receive calls AND as long as you have VM cable (which needs no land line) - you can always have a totally free land line number on-line. I use https://www.sipgate.co.uk - you get to choose your own 01 or 02 land line local number and receive incoming calls and free answer machine service even if you have no credit. If you decide that you want to make outgoing calls, you can add £5 credit and UK calls are billed at 2p/min with no connection fee.

Hope this helps some of you