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

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.

I disagree. In addition to those limits, there is also the detrimental use policy where they reserve the right to warn or disconnect you if they think your usage is too high. How high is too high they will not tell you.

Link:

"We do not have a defined acceptable usage figure.
If your usage during the hours of 0900 and 2100 daily doesn�t significantly reduce, this can lead to your broadband service being temporarily suspended or even permanently disconnected without further notice.

Not very upfront at all if you ask me. Especially since they don't provide any accurate reliable way for you to determine your usage.

Edited by deleted (Fri 18-May-12 17:53:41)

Thanks info.... that's worth keeping in mind as I would have expected Sky to insist on at least 30 days notice for termination of the service.

I'm now looking at comparing the price of just getting Virgin Broadband and keeping my phone with Sky. Of course I understand that to get a 'better' deal, they want you to get one of their bundles but looking at the charges for Virgin's telephone service, a rough calculation shows they are more expensive than what I'm paying for Sky phone now.

Bottom line is that it doesn't look like my local exchange is going to be updated in the near future and Virgin Broadband would give me much higher broadband speeds than I'm getting at the moment.

Thanks for the response

Thanks info.

From what you've said, it doesn't look as cut 'n' dry as it first seemed ...

For example; Sky (who I'm with at the moment) offer a truly unlimited policy for their broadband. With the introduction of Sky Anytime+ (download 'on-demand' TV via your broadband connection direct to the Sky box), it would be rather odd for them to start limiting the amount you download as they clearly want Sky customers to use their anytime+ package.

One of the reasons I'd now be happy to move to Virgin Broadband is Sky's recent change of policy with regards Anytime+ (at first, you could only use the service if you were also a Sky Broadband customer) and that you can use the Anytime+ service, no matter who your broadband provider is.

Anytime+ is something I use a lot and if those sort of restrictions you mention started to apply, mainly because of using something like the Sky Anytime+ service, then that could be a problem.

I'd really like the extra speeds available via Virgin, but I guess I'm going to have to think a bit harder if it would be worth moving or not.

Thanks again for the info

In reply to a post by qasdfdsaq:

I disagree. In addition to those limits, there is also the detrimental use policy where they reserve the right to warn or disconnect you if they think your usage is too high. How high is too high they will not tell you.

They stopped issuing the threatening letters months ago.

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/General-broadban...

IMO it's probably why so many areas are now virtually unusable - it was the last ditch defence against a 24x7 seeder and now there is none other than the STM which only helps others a bit as it is far too generous on the speed reduction,

Edited by kwikbreaks (Fri 18-May-12 21:53:59)

If that's the case then my apologies. The information's still on their website, so I assumed it was still in effect.

I just added the link. http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/General-broadban...

The VM website is a bigger pile of junk than their network...