Virgin Media Business & Moving House

We currently have a virgin media connection at 10meg down 700kbps up (which has no options to upgrade). But we wish to move house! The options we have been given are:
To pay a cancellation fee which is basically the full sum of the rest of the contract.
Or get forced to sign into another 24 month contract on the 10meg service which is £62 a month.

Surely this just stinks and is down right illegal. All we want to do is move house and downgrade to the residential service, as it is cheaper and the business features are no longer needed.

With all this, we are ok paying the £150 for re-connection at the new house and continue with the service until October, which is the time when the current contract runs out. But we're not happy with having to put up with an ancient 10meg/700kbps service (a connection vmbusiness do not even openly sell anymore) for another 2 years at a price for more than a 100meg residential.

Does anyone have any ideas for what we can do?

Expectations of fair are often different for business services, i.e. you are expected to spend more time looking into the legal side of things.

The price differential might be that if this is a cable connection, it is 10 Mbps with no traffic management, i.e. they are happy for you to use it as a real unlimited connection.

How much of the contract is left?

Thanks for the reply MrSaffron.

The contract ends in October.

We've come to terms with keeping the connection until end of contract, and having it moved to the new house. That in our opinion is fair... But when we move house, Virgin Media are forcing us to re-sign a new 24 month contract, and wont let us just continue with the current one. This is the part which stinks.

if the connection is a standard DOCSIS type connection, as oppossed to a special build then yes should be easy enough to do what you ask.

If you are a SME then it might be worth seeking some legal guidance. Alas business contracts do not always have all the consumer protection bits. So providers can do things like this.

downgrade your package then leave it a month or so then pay up and leave

I'm assuming this is because its a new installation?

Does your connection run over the CATV network or is it fiber? I assume it is over the DOCSIS network because of the price.

It is standard practice to make people sign a new contract who move. This is the same for home users aswell.

You can't downgrade your package whilst in contract.

does not matter if your moving house its norm an new contract, this is quite normal