Sky or Virgin??

macman

crazycatlady1984 wrote: »

Hey Spike, thanks for the above and your previous post.

I am not sure to be honest

This is the link to the deal, it is the £20 I am thinking of getting; I think it is cable?

http://shop.virginmedia.com/digital-tv/special_offer.html

Are you in a VM cable area or not? You can't get the TV packages if you are not, they are only delivered by cable.

visidigi

http://shop.virginmedia.com/home.html

put your postal code in the box on the right of that page, it will come back and tell you if you have cable or national services

spike7451

crazycatlady1984 wrote: »

Hey Spike, thanks for the above and your previous post.

I am not sure to be honest

This is the link to the deal, it is the £20 I am thinking of getting; I think it is cable?

http://shop.virginmedia.com/digital-tv/special_offer.html

That link is for a Cabled area,in which case the broadband comes over the CATV feed as opposed to the phoneline.On a cable phoneline on this service,you cannot have any broadband (BT/Sky/VM National/TTalk ect) due to the way cable phone services work.
Because it comes over the CATV & not the phoneline,the installers will run the CATV to anywhere in the house for the service.From what I've heard,the Superhub is pants so you would be better getting your own Cable Router (the Cable Broadband connects to a Modem only,called a SACM or Stand Alone Cable Modem) to connect to the modem.
As I'm not in a cabled area myself,I'm not best placed to reccomend a good cable router for you.

crazycatlady1984

Thanks all, appreciate the advice but am starting to realise how little I know about this and really need to look into a lot more before making any decisions!

However, despite sky insisting I had to pay for new router, lo and behold one arrived this morning! Got it all plugged in and tinternet appears to be working pretty good! So will stick with them until the next time something goes wrong cheers again guys, and happy new year!!

:beer:

chanz4

spike7451 wrote: »

Sky,like all ISP's except VM,don't have any engineers that work on the phonelines,these third party engineers you speak of are actually BT Openreach engineers.Problem is in 80% of cases,the engineer that comes out has nothing to do with broadband & is only a phone engineer.I take it he didn't do any tests?
When I was with Sky,if the router was faulty we used to send one out for free.As to chanz4's comment,I was a NTL/VM engineer since 1998 & can assure you that in the majority of cases,the engineers are very good &,with the exception of about 80% of the installers,work directly for VM.The installers mentioned are subbies.

I was a broadband engineer for bt, and not a phone engineer. But yes we did it on behalf of other companys also.

fosheezy

Buzby wrote: »

If Virgin CABLE, then it's a no-brainer - you have a Fibre-to-cabinet, then Coax to Router, providing the most robust internet connection, as well as the fastest speeds, and lowest number of subscribers sharing the same channel.

Anyone who has access to cable, yet selects ADSL over the phoneline is purposely taking an inferior connection. Even if VM was the worst company on the planet (and to some, it is) it is worth the effort to only take BB, and no other service can compare to the resilience - after 12 years of using both, ADSL is a kludge and should be viewed only as a fall-back.

I beg to differ. Virgin cable is woefully oversubscribed in many neighbourhoods right across the country. Their own support forums are clogged every day with hundreds of posts from soon-to-be-ex-customers who are locked into contracts for "high-speed" cable internet, but are getting massive packet loss & jitter and pathetic download speeds. Their customer service gives you the run around for weeks, then they eventually admit there is a problem but it'll take another 2 months to fix, and then they either keep postponing that date or they tell you it was fixed & if you still have issues well then its a new problem and you need to start the process again.

I've had ADSL from a number of providers in the past, and I've never had any problems that even came close to the terrible connection problems & even worse customer service than I've had from Virgin Media. As soon as I can cancel my VM contract I'll be going right back to ADSL, thank you very much. Maybe I won't be able to get this mythical "100 meg" pipe, but at least I'll have a connection that is stable enough to allow me to actually make non-trivial use of the internet.

IMHO, if Rule #1 is "Avoid TalkTalk" then Rule #2 should be "Avoid Virgin Media".

DreamerQ

Virgin Media many times transfers me to India for technical assistance, I don't understand their accent half the times.. but isn't this also the case for Sky?

superjaggybunnet

Virgin cable. I am paying for 10Mb and this is what I am getting right now. Normally it is at least this and sometimes it is even upwards of 12 meg.

No complaints about Virgin. I have been with them for years and any time I have an issue they sort it quick style.

I have never used Sky so cannot comment on their service.