Is it cheaper to leave a virgin bundle for seperate deals?

kgldsun

We currently have Virgin Media package of L Broadband and XL Phone and TV. For this we are pay in excess of £50 per month after all extras for telephone calls etc.
We desperatly want to cut this down and decided to try and go with talk Talk and then a obtain a seperate TV package.

Alas this or any of the cheap phone providers are not available to us as we dont have a BT landline or like. (we did before we got virgin) Virgin were not very forthcoming with threats of leaving them either!

We especially do not want to change our telephone number either.
It really is a minefield what to do:(
Please can anybody suggest what you think is the better option? maybe join a sky bundle, buy all seperate or stay with Virgin?

Thanks in advance,

Gordon_Hose

Well, all I can think of is Sky's TV, phone and Broadband for £20. You may have seen the adverts on TV?

Depends if it suits your needs though. Obviously the price will go up if you add extra packages or Movies/Sports to your TV package. But for £20, it seems pretty decent.

macman

If you don't have a BT line then you cannot have any other phone provider-VM are the only cable provider, and their telephony is the most expensive around.
How can you be paying £50 pm just for calls, assuming you have an Anytime package-you must be making a huge no. of exclusive calls (mobiles, overseas, premium rate etc)?

Gordon_Hose

BT or Sky can install a line, granted it'll be chargeable. But after 6 months the OP will have recouped that cost through the cheaper package price.

Depends if the OP has the money to pay the really big initial bill lol

kgldsun

Sorry I dont think I explained it too well! We pay £46 a month for our package. After our extra telephone calls and vat it usually comes to well over £50. thats even after searching the 'saynoto08' numbers.
I am wondering if the sky package as mentioned earlier will be the good option if only to get a landline back thats open to the many cheap telephone companies once our contract was finished?
Thank you so much for all the help. Much appreciated.

Gordon_Hose

It's definitely worth getting a phone line installed, like you said, it'll open up all the other cheaper products.

And if you want to go back to VM in the future you can just transfer back.

Alternatively you could consider dropping the XL's to L, or even M?

Stuart_W

Whilst you're still in contract to VM you can still save a little on phone calls.
What package have you got?

You can remove the connection fee and high per-minute cost of any chargeable calls by using Telesave.
1.5p/min daytime and 1p/min off peak with no connection fee, min 4p charge. Also allows cheaper 0870 and 0845 than VM.
Join instantly and start using today by dialling 0800 066 2266 before every call. You will need to top up £10 - and I'm always surprised how long £10 lasts. The credit will also still be available once you switch (if you do) to a BT-based line.

Another option for cable users is First Telecom and whilst they provide a free little box to plug in that does all the re-routing for you, can be slightly less competitive now, and a 7.3p minimum charge - but still can offer significant savings over VM - but you need to unplug the box to make sure you bypass it during any free bundled VM calls.

kgldsun

Stuart_W wrote: »

Whilst you're still in contract to VM you can still save a little on phone calls.
What package have you got?

Thank you for taking the time to reply Stuart. No I am no longer in a contract with VM but am at a loss what to do next to cut down costs. As we have cable we are not able to access any of the cheap phone/broadband providers, eg talk talk etc I was wondering what people thought best to do, eg join sky in order we get the phone line that will give us more cheaper options once out of the 12mnth minimum, or stay with VM? VM have advised me that skys Broadband is of little use when you have the basic package?
Its all a minefield to me and all I want to do is try and save money on my economy drive! lol.
I forgot to mention our package is XL phone + Broadband with L TV at a cost of £49 + extras on any 08 or mobile calls. Thanks.

Stuart_W

One other thing to note - you are able to take your cable number with you to a BT-based service - this is exactly what we did in 2006.

However, we now have a phone number that cannot be switched to any of the available LLU (cheaper) broadband options in our area, as they all insist a change of number will be necessary. Our existing provider (The Phone Co-op) offers LLU and non-LLU (BT-Openreach based) services, and despite being in a LLU area, we can only get the non-LLU services unless we're prepared to change our number.

Various companies originally said that that we could keep our number, we even signed up and it was only when the service was supposed to be being connected that they cancelled everything on us. Only the Phone Co-op were honest from the start, and were the first company that actually explained this to us (one reason why we stuck with them).

I presume this same situation applies everywhere. A cable-originating landline number cannot, it seems, be applied to a LLU service. If the number was originally a BT one, ported to cable and then ported back, that is probably going to be different. Someone may be able to correct with their experience.

That said, sticking with BT still offers you a whole host of cheaper options, just not the LLU options if you've taken a cable number with you.