Bye bye Vodafone; hello VM!

AngelsMadv

I'm not sure if you have all seen but I've now made my mind up where I'm going with my Mobile business!

HERE

£15 a month (30 day contract!) for Ultd everything! O . M .G!

Vodafone guy just laughed on phone and said he couldn't match it so gave the the PAC code hahah!

Virgin here we come. I'll then put my OH and kids on it too so we get ult calls to each other FREE! :T:T:T

Go Virgin Media! I'm sorry all other companies, but you've a long way to catch up. Nearest retention offer was £17.42 a month but that had a 1GB limit on Data. OK so their speeds are 7mb/s compared to VM's capped 2m/s but quite frankly I don't ever download huge amounts or stream anything in a H area.

ZhugeEX

Virgin don't cap speeds anymore. (Well they could at any time)
There is a fair use of 3.5GB on the data but that's more than your 1GB so....

Quick tip. Ring them up after three months and they'll do the deal for £10pm.

(Can't guarantee the above but it's what existing customers are getting)

Herongull

It is only a good deal if you and your family really use huge amounts of calls, texts and data.

If you actually use less then you may be wasting your money paying for what you don't need.

Several virtual providers also offer unlimited calls and texts within network

Ovivo give you free each month: 150 minutes, 200 texts and 500mb and free unlimited calls and texts within network.

ZhugeEX

Well duh.

I guess the OP wanted the mins though based on the fact they were going for the £17 sim only retention deal which comes with unl calls/texts/1GB

But i agree, for the kids there is no point getting them an unlimited plan. Get them payg or a capped contract.

chris1973

Unfortunately, Virgin Mobile also compress the hell out of images, and unlike accessing the 'Accelerator' page of T-Mobile and Orange, you cannot switch it off nor reduce the level of image compression on VM

This fact is confirmed by their own rep, "Krystal" here:-

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Mobile/Image-compression-on-3G/td-p/1146481

So if you have an expensive phone with an high resolution display, if using it on Virgin you may as well have settled for a £49 el-cheapo phone with a bog standard display because with images, graphics etc loading heavily compressed you aren't going to get the benefit!.

The compression is cranked up to such a point, that on occasion images fail to load completely, or only part load and those that do, of course often appear grainy or low res due to the amount of compression applied.

Speed, is of course generally subject to local conditions and so your experience may (hopefully) not be the same as mine!, but i've yet to see more than 2.3mbps download and 0.3mbps upload speeds on Virgin (and even those occasions are rare!).

Generally, I more routinely get under 0.8mbps down and 0.15 mbps up and thats even before the 3.5gb throttling kicks in, and in HSDPA enabled areas.

Here is a screenshot which I did for Virgin, showing my speed test results over two days back in April, these were taken from three different locations, within a 70 miles radius at different times of the day and all with a full signal.

http://postimg.org/image/5avh0uynb/

In addition to their crap speeds, I only joined Virgin last October, and since then i've seen nothing but goalpost moving and restrictions inflicted on customers, for example the FUP of 10gb was introduced and then a few months later that 10gb was further reduced to 3.5gb which is where it stands currently.

Virgin don't cap speeds anymore. (Well they could at any time)

Yes, they do. Once the 3.5gb FUP has been exceeded your 'unlimited' package speed becomes throttled back to 384kbps which is actually pretty useless for anything other than web browsing.

For customers who joined Virgin Media after 25 June 2012 excessive use over 3.5GB of data per calendar month will result in their maximum bandwidth being restricted to 3G speeds (384kbit/s downstream, 200kbit/s upstream) on our network.

Here is a link to this on their website, just in case you disagree

http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/genericContent.do?contentId=our.service.footer.sm068#Virgin%20Media%20Mobile%20Acceptable%20Use%20Policy%20%20Pay%20Monthly


They also removed the ability to Tether during the same period also, so who knows what other reductions and restrictions *could* be levied in the future, given the three major changes i've already experienced as a customer in well under 12 months already.

So don't be congratulating yourself on the move just yet!

AngelsMadv

chris1973 wrote: »

[...]
So don't be congratulating yourself on the move just yet!

Chris,

Thank you for all the above information. I will, of course, be sampling them for 30 days. If during this period my experience is as yours, I will go elsewhere.

ZhugeEX You are correct. I use lots of minutes and hence my want of an unlimited tariff. The wife can then go on the £12 tariff with the DD and DS1 on the £5 tariffs.

I do like the Ovio cards and was looking into this also.

AngelsMadv

Scrub that - Thank you Mr Vodafone retention team

Trolley_Dolley

AngelsMadv wrote: »

I'm not sure if you have all seen but I've now made my mind up where I'm going with my Mobile business!

HERE

£15 a month (30 day contract!) for Ultd everything! O . M .G!

Vodafone guy just laughed on phone and said he couldn't match it so gave the the PAC code hahah!

Virgin here we come. I'll then put my OH and kids on it too so we get ult calls to each other FREE! :T:T:T

Go Virgin Media! I'm sorry all other companies, but you've a long way to catch up. Nearest retention offer was £17.42 a month but that had a 1GB limit on Data. OK so their speeds are 7mb/s compared to VM's capped 2m/s but quite frankly I don't ever download huge amounts or stream anything in a H area.

Thanks for you info regarding the virgin sim, myself and partner have also ordered these and will be saving £45 between us by both having the £15 sim with unlimited everything...bargain!
Would not have known about this had you not mentioned it here, :T