Move from Sky LLU to Virgin Media?

Hi.

I�m currently with Sky for my telephone and broadband and although Sky have recently rolled out their fibre broadband service, my local exchange is not down on any list for an upgrade to fibre any time soon so I�m looking at the possibility of moving over to Virgin Media as I�m in an area with their cable service.

My current telephone and broadband service from Sky is full LLU but I�m guessing if I did move to Virgin Media, it would not be a case of getting a MAC, but just giving the appropriate amount of notice to Sky that I�m dropping their service?

So, I was wondering how easy or otherwise is it to carry over my existing telephone number to the Virgin Media service? My guess is that the best deals are when you bundle the likes of telephone and broadband packages but of course I�d prefer to keep my existing telephone number if I did move.

Thanks in advance for any info

There will be no problem porting the number. It seems that you actually use the phone so you should consider the fact that VM telephony charges are pretty high. VOIP is an alternative but you probably wouldn't get cashback and free install deals if you don't take the phone line - it's their cash cow.

You should also be aware that many VM areas are badly congested. If possible try to find somebody in your immediate neighbourhood with cable and check what their experience is. Taking on new customers on the doubled speeds before the necessary upgrades are in place and giving anybody that calls in moaning immediate double speed is not helping.

If you use your connection for gaming then be aware that cable suffers far more jitter than ADSL.

As it's usually an 18 month minimum contract think very carefully and do some checking before moving. Don't cancel the ADSL until your cable is up and running - there is a 28 or 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If you are not satisfied don't hesitate to cancel and don't believe any promises about any imminent upgrade.

Many thanks for the quick response and info

Yes, I'd be keeping my 'land-line' telephone service and checking out prices on something like the 60 meg service, of course it's a better deal when bundled with their phone service.

I don't play games so that's not an issue, but I've just seen that their adverts say you can download as much as you like.... hmm... wonder if that's a sales pitch, or true?

Ok about not cancelling before the service is up and running. Again, my guess is that Sky would require 30 days notice for cancellation of the services so I guess it wouldn't be too bad to have a months overlap of the two services. As far as I can tell, the minimum contract for Virgin Media is 12 months.

I'll have a look around and see if I can get info on any possible congestion issues in our area. I regularly get about 6.5 megs broadband around here, because of the distance from our local exchange, so the prospect of anything like the speeds that Virgin advertise is very attractive

Thanks again for the info.

VM are completely upfront about traffic management...

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.contr...

Those are the limits to the "unlimited" service. Any other limits are purely congestion which as I said can be severe in some areas and can take quite a while to get fixed. That said you'd probably exceed 6.5Mbps most of the time come what may.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

VM are completely upfront about traffic management...

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.contr...

Those are the limits to the "unlimited" service. Any other limits are purely congestion which as I said can be severe in some areas and can take quite a while to get fixed. That said you'd probably exceed 6.5Mbps most of the time come what may.

Thanks again for the reply and info.

It's good that they are upfront with caps/limits etc. I've done another check to see if there's any chance our local exchange will get an upgrade to fibre any time soon but it looks like it's way off so I may well give Virgin Media a try

Cheers

It works well for most people. It did for me for well over a year and then went to rat's. They showed no real interest in fixing it so I downgraded from 50Mbps to 10Mbps which they always delivered unless I exceeded to rather low evening STM limits and got throttled back.

Judging by the TBB ping monitor my area is probably now OK just over 6 months later but they are now giving new customers 3 times my speed (and limits) for the same price while I'd have to call in and re-contract to get that so I'll continue with my plan to take Infinity which is supposed to be available at the end of June.

I guess if your area is now upgraded by BT and you can get Infinity, then Virgin have competition and may well start to sort out congestion problems etc.

I've just been chatting with someone in the area with Virgin Media and they say they have been lucky and not had any problems. In fact they were telling me that they'd recently (last couple of days) had a sales rep' from Virgin phoning them up to let them know that their existing 10 meg broadband would soon be upgraded to 30 megs. Happy days for them I guess but hopefully they wont start to see those problems you mention with contention.

Cheers

They may or they may not - it's all very much a postcode lottery. The problem with cable is that the local pipes are low capacity so a 100Mbps customer who is also a torrent freak evading shaping by using a VPN can wreck the performance of a couple of hundred or more other customers by using up over half of the local upstream for as long as it is left seeding. It can be half the downstream too but at 100Mbps the downloads shouldn't last too long - even full quality bluray rips. Of course there could be more than one in the street... Plus several customers using VoD streaming can screw things up too.

In reply to a post by sam_nospam:

Many thanks for the quick response and info

Yes, I'd be keeping my 'land-line' telephone service and checking out prices on something like the 60 meg service, of course it's a better deal when bundled with their phone service.

I don't play games so that's not an issue, but I've just seen that their adverts say you can download as much as you like.... hmm... wonder if that's a sales pitch, or true?

Ok about not cancelling before the service is up and running. Again, my guess is that Sky would require 30 days notice for cancellation of the services so I guess it wouldn't be too bad to have a months overlap of the two services. As far as I can tell, the minimum contract for Virgin Media is 12 months.

I'll have a look around and see if I can get info on any possible congestion issues in our area. I regularly get about 6.5 megs broadband around here, because of the distance from our local exchange, so the prospect of anything like the speeds that Virgin advertise is very attractive

Thanks again for the info.

Sky no longer have any days for phone/BB cut off it used to be 30 days now its straight away when i canceled mine in time for the 30days thing she said we no longer have it so do you want to stop it today as planed or wait till you need it cutting off so i stuck with the the extra 30days when i switched to my current provider (best to ring up to 100% confirm this though as sky change there minds every 2 mins lol)

As for the VM contract the BB/TV is 12 month the phone is 18month

Ash