Advice needed

morphiushell

Ok let me explain the situation.

I live with my parents we have the full TV packaged with SKY and we also have Virgin phone and broadband.

We have Sky multi room with ESPN and the HD channels in my room.

I have just purchased my own home and move in end of May. I am trying to find the best way to do things now. As I am used to Sky I would love to have it in my new house but the cost to have the full package + HD + Espn with virgin phone and internet I am looking at £110 per month. The whole package including the phone and internet with sky is £95 per month and the whole package TV phone braodband etc with Virgin is £92 per month.

I am looking at advice on what I should do.

I am under the impression that Sky is much better tv wise but virgin is better broadband wise is this fair to say?

Heinz

I'd agree with both statements.

morphiushell

Is Sky's internet much worse than virgin and will I get away with taking the whole package from SKY or should I take SKY TV and Virgin phone + broadband?

Idiophreak

Just putting it out there - I pay £25/month for phone and broadband (24mb). I've got a humax foxsat HD PVR, so have a decent amount of HD content, films, sport and so on. If you did the same, fine, you'd miss Gladiators and the other sky-only content, but you'd have an extra £85/month beer money toward watching ESPN in the pub - it's like free beer!

spike7451

morphiushell wrote: »

Is Sky's internet much worse than virgin and will I get away with taking the whole package from SKY or should I take SKY TV and Virgin phone + broadband?

It depends,if you can only get Virgin National broadband,then in all likelyhood the service will be no worse or better than Sky's as it's supplied down the phoneline,if however you are on a Virgin cable broadband service,then the the speeds will be much better as the broadband is delivered over the Coax line & not the phone.

daggy

Broadband

I used to work at sky as broadband tech support and the average speed I seen was about 7 or 8mb...

but a fair few were getting 10-12 mb; anything above 15 and you better start putting the lottery on as you're one lucky SOAB.

Up until we moved home, I had virgin tv, bb and phone. I only had 10mb with virgin and it was more than enough speed, so I didn't need to pay any extra for more speed. I could still watch footy online (legally of course :money:) and download anything I wanted.

Sky will be in close proximity to that speedwise in most cases; but can be worse. Also depends if you are an onnet customer or offnet.

TV

Virgin

TV wise, Virgins TV is good, but the box used to freeze a lot and I had several problems with the hardrive failing during recording or deleting/losing stuff; on one occasion it didn't record the footy. :mad:
Having said that, I could have formated it and this may have helped.

Also the content on the OD BBC iPlayer and ITV Net player is not as comprehensive as the website versions of said 'players', so you can't always watch programmes you've misused.

Aside from that, the TV was good, plus you get ESPN for free - sky charge £12pm for it.

Virgin are about to bring out (might have already done it) a Tivo box,
It will also allow you to watch online content and download apps like you do on smartphones.

Tivo is an american company, they are renowned for their superior EPG which makes finding programmes easier than the current sky or virgin EPG's.

Sky actually had a contract with Tivo,but that ended as the companies couldn't work together, not long after the contract was ended sky's new EPG came out - go figure :rotfl:

One annoying thing is that you don't own the virgin box - it's rented from them, so when you terminate your contract they will ask for it back. With sky, after 12 months, you own the box.


Sky

Having not had sky TV for a while I can only comment on what I've seen at other peoples houses.

The HJD content is much more comprehensive.

The Box lags less. The EPG is better (until Tivo comes out).
You own the equipment.

Phone

Well, a phones a phone really.



Only thing I've found that bothes me is that virgin charge for caller ID, whereas Sky don't.

Customer Service
One big thing that bothered me was all of the foreign call centres that virgin operate, it's exponentially harder to communicate with the staff.

Sky have UK call centres running until 11pm (for BB tech and Sales, maybe other departments too?).


I'm stuck with sky now as there are no fiber optic cables in my street, just wish I hadn't missed the friends and family discount by a month. Finding it hard to get a deal from them. Bah

Anyway, just my thoughts on it, hope it helps.

ukcarper

morphiushell wrote: »

Is Sky's internet much worse than virgin and will I get away with taking the whole package from SKY or should I take SKY TV and Virgin phone + broadband?

If your new house is a long way from exchange your internet speed could be much lower with sky. Go to bt broadband speed checker and you should get a rough idea what you can get with sky.

daggy

ukcarper wrote: »

If your new house is a long way from exchange your internet speed could be much lower with sky. Go to bt broadband speed checker and you should get a rough idea what you can get with sky.

RE the speed checker

When I was at Sky, as well as the internal tools we had, we'd aklso use this website

Sam Knows

I found it to be pretty accurate.