Virgin Media broadband overall costs - help needed

On_The_Ball

Hello,

I'm an out-of-contract Sky user, fed up with paying for the 20mbs broadband service and getting nothing like that speed. I pay £10 a month for that and £11 for the phone line. I haven't changed providers before, so I'm a little wary.....

I'm not able to get Virgin according to their website, but an engineer called me yesterday to let me know that he'd looked at the cabling in my road and that we actually can - so I've had a look round the Virgin site to see what's available.

As far as I can tell, I can get the XXL (50mbs) broadband service and the bog standard phone line (M, free weekend calls) for £27.16 a month (over 12 months), after discounts and cashback etc. Broken down, that is:

Package is £440.88 for the year, £36.74pm (£26.99 for the first three months, £39.99 thereafter)

Minus
£50 credit for taking a phone package online
£65 Quidco cashback

= £325.88, or £27.16 per month.

The 'one-off cost' of £60 is also waived, as is activation (£20) and installation is free.

Can that really be right??? Hope someone can help.....

Thanks!

macman

Do you really need the full 50 megs, or could you not come down to the next lower speed?

On_The_Ball

I don't desperately need it, but I download a lot of films. On Sky they take an eternity and on the lower Virgin packages they throttle speeds, so it would defeat the object of moving.

macman

What I'm saying is that if you're only getting 'up to' 20 megs on Sky, (what actual speed are you getting?) then an actual 20 megs on VM cable is going to seem a lot faster.

On_The_Ball

Ah, I see. That works out to about £20 a month. It's the throttling that puts me off - they then have licence to do what they like.

Either way - does it seem right? Will I be able to order online, despite not appearing on their list?

warehouse

I have VM XL package and the 20mb is great for film downloading. I've used it at various times and speed has never been an issue.

Keith

Will you be downloading a lot of films with the new piracy laws?

macman

On_The_Ball wrote: »

Ah, I see. That works out to about £20 a month. It's the throttling that puts me off - they then have licence to do what they like.

Either way - does it seem right? Will I be able to order online, despite not appearing on their list?

So what is your current speed? All you have said is that it's less than 20.

micky045

To be fair to Sky, although they advertise 20mb broadband, they never say you will get that as they advertise it as UP TO 20mb. I have the same problem, I get between 8mb-10mb but i'm happy with that. I feel it's enough for downloads etc

kwikbreaks

With 20Mbps VM cable you can download 7GB between 10 and 3 and 3.5GB between 4 and 9 without hitting the STM which pegs you to 5Mbps for 5 hours from the time you exceeed the limit.

There are also upload caps but you'd only exceed those by using P2P naively.

If you hammer 50Mbps 24x7 (or just between 9am and 9pm regularly) you will still get a snotty letter because although there is no throttling there is still an acceptable use policy in force.

Upload speeds are being increased to 10% of download. Once that is done in your area there will be packet shaping in place on all products during peak periods. P2P and NNTP were specifically mentioned but there was no detail on either what P2P protocols or the degree of shaping.

You'd need to be an avid film buff to hit the STM on 20Mbps.

On_The_Ball

macman - I believe the speed test I ran last week was 2.7mbs down. The throttling limits won't be a problem for me as I'm sure I won't download 3.5gb in an evening too often (thanks kwikbreaks).

And I'm not downloading anything I shouldn't!

Now all I need to do is get Virgin to install it. The two people I spoke to last night hung up on me as the answers I was giving weren't on their sheets - they just said that I need to "wait". Well the cables went down years ago and I'm still waiting! I don't want to go through the engineer as I won't get the discounts, but I can't go through the website - how can I make Virgin understand this? Is there a good time to call to get someone in this country on the phone?