Joining Virgin...then leaving

I'm currently with Pipex, but I'm thinking of taking the 10MB bb, phone & basic TV package from Virgin for £24.45 per month. They can finesse some deal to get over the £30 installation charge and I can live with £7.50 delivery for the wireless router. What worries me is the prospect of moving back to BT at the end of the contract if I'm not happy with Virgin.
BT have some draconian charges for connection or reconnection. Has anyone been over the course or looked into this?
It's the final factor. No charges and I become a Virgin again. ;-)

How much will you have saved by the end of the contract?

I suppose it depends how long I stay with Virgin (or whoever I sign up for). I'm looking at the cost over the 12 month contract, but if I'm honest, it'll probably stay for longer. It's a year and a half since I decided to move on from Pipex and this is me just getting down to the serious stuff now.
I see the chance to get a faster connection and a wireless router. I might not go for a bundle. I might consider Be Unlimited or NewNet if BT would cruicify me after a spell with Virgin.

What I'm getting at is if there is a reasonable saving over the period, and the service is better than now, then actually even if you have to pay a re-connection fee then it isn't quite as bad as it sounds.

The difference between the re-connection cost and the savings made is the price of the better connection. And if the savings are higher than the re-connection cost you have won anyway.

Newnet is a very good ISP if your total uploads and downloads are under 20GB, or only occasionally fractionally higher. IDNet, Zen and AAISP worth looking at but expensive.

Have you checked you can actually get Be? Don't just check samknows, also try your phone number on the Be web site. Similarly with O2 (in area = LLU). If you can get O2/Be look for a recent post by MKD in their forums here and follow the tinyurl link in his sig. An excellent comparison of the two, and tips on cashback and so on. (I got an email today saying my cash-back had been sent to my bank...looks...hmmm, maybe overnight update!). O2 Access at the moment has quite bad capacity problems in some areas. O2 LLU and Be a few complaints, but upgrades due in 6-8 weeks.

Ahhh - I see your point.
Frankly, I fear £100+ one-off charges which I might struggle to find. It might be enough to make me procrastinate, potentially staying with an ISP I was disenchanted with. Oh well, it's just the internet.
The Be site says I'm OK. But what's with no email address included in the Value price? Isn't that a bit 1990s? I know I can get a Purple Cloud account or something, but I'm a simple soul...
Appreciate your advice, Roberto.

If you can get Be you can probably get O2.

I say probably because in the beginning was Be. A bit niche-market for the techies. Be set up a pretty good ADSL2+ network. (That means up to 24Mbps - BT are just about getting round to a modified and less good version of it 3 or 4 years later).

O2 decided that like Orange they needed to be in the internet market. Rather than start from scratch they bought Be. So O2 runs on (in general) the same equipment as Be, certainly at the exchange, but they seem to split the number of connections they each have at an enabled exchange when it is enabled or upgraded. So one may have free connections but not the other.

Back to the subject. O2 includes email, and is generally better value for money especially if you have an O2 mobile. See the MKD document. However it isn't as flexible or easy to get some settings changed if you want a bit of control. Think O2 = mass market, Be = internet sophisticates. (Commonly known as geeks ).

However I am completely and utterly "anti" ISP-hosted email services. They are on balance a pain in the ... (think of an alternative next word to "neck").

In particular because of the hassle, which grows each time, of telling all your contacts, changing all your partner's or your internet shopping accounts, updateing information email sources ... every time you migrate.

It locks you in, is often unreliable, and usually gives you a completely yukky email address.

Purple Cloud I have been with for 2 years now - just renewed my main domain registration through them. Not the cheapest but since then I have added four more domains and two web hosting packages. So I must be happy - and I'm easily upset by poor service or supplier performance!

£7.50 gets you a .co.uk or .me.uk domain, (more choice on .me.uk as far fewer registrations using it), yourdomain.co.uk registered for two years with Nominet, the UK authority, in your name not Purple Cloud's. Some other providers tie you in by registering it in their name and charging you to release it if you want to move to a different provider.

Then £10 per year for an email package to go with it. something@yourdomain.me.uk. Ten mailboxes, unlimited aliases, normal POP3/SMTP plus IMAP and webmail, and Spam Assassin running on the servers. Or £20 for a basic web space account which includes that email package. www.yourdomain.me.uk.

It's dead simple to sign up and be up and running normally within a few hours. My additional domains and web space took minutes. The only slightly complicated bit is turning on Spam Assassin, I think it is off by default, and the user control interface is far from good. (Plesk). They tell me a more user-friendly one is to be introduced some time in the future.

So you get a good-looking email address that you chose, notify all your contacts etc. as above straight away, and start sending and receiving from it immediately while still reading from your current one to see if any turn up that you have missed.

Then when migration day arrives absolutely no panic about getting your email service with the new ISP set up and trying/failing to notify every contact. Normally nothing at all to change! (And if you see any port 25 blocks mentioned anywhere, then with Purple Cloud you will have one change, perhaps a few more depending on how you set it up, to make in your mailbox set-ups in your email program).

You might find this post interesting, particularly the bit about the mobile.

Do BT charge for reconnection now? I know they charge for a new line; something like £125 plus VAT! I thought they reconnected for free?

I've been with Virgin (NTL) for over a year now and they seem OK. Was with Pipex for about a year but I understand they have (like most ISPs) changed now.

In reply to:

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Do BT charge for reconnection now? I know they charge for a new line; something like £125 plus VAT! I thought they reconnected for free?

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I think if it is still a BT Wholesale line, through someone like the Post Office, Plusnet, Madasafish and others then it is a free "Return to Donor" process.

But if the phone has been LLU'ed as in a lot of Tiscali/Pipex, TalkTalk and soon Sky then there is a re-connection fee.

Return to donor tends to expire after a period of time, it seems to be one of those badly documented deals.

With Virgin cable I would be expected the reconnect fee these days as there is porting back of the number, and a very high chance the E side pair has been reused for another persons line.

Took your advice and set up a Purple Cloud account.
I've mentioned I lack the confidence to launch headfirst into these things, so I'll have a wee lie down before taking the next step.
Which will probably be signing up for a Be Unlimited Value connection. Probably.