Virgin Media / Sky LLU/ Be Broadband

I have costed out Broadband for the above providers and it comes to pretty much the same (have TV in the mix too).
I am a long time Be user and have had a good experience with them however I am now moving somewhere where cable is an option (Wandsworth Exchange).
VM seems to be heavily criticised for throttling so 60M is apparently just a dream (connection will be fairly heavily used by 4 people at peak times so I imagine we will be throttled).
Sky claim not to throttle but will be around 15M.
Be are likely to be the same bandwidth but I do like my experience thus far (particularly with the control over target SNR, fastpath etc, when there are issues.
The big unknown is contention on the exchange/Node for all of the above.
Does anyone have any thoughts?

Edited by oracleredux (Wed 22-Aug-12 21:35:47)

I think you've already found issues with Virgin. Be would be slightly faster than Sky (due to more options over SNR) but would they be the same Price? I'd expect Be to be about £22 per month and Sky £7.50.

To me the difference in price would be worth going with Sky.

Talking sense is forbidden.

Ah, to me the extra money is worth it for better upstream (I got 700Kb on Sky but 1.2Mb on Be wholesale based provider) and not being locked in to Sky's phone contract with full LLU.

How much of a financial difference would be needed? I got £9.25 off my line rental (£3 instead of £12.25) for signing up to Sky Fibre. The discount is for 12 months.

I don't have a specific amount. I will compare all the options and consider whether the price is worth it for me. But, I'm not overly keen on bundle packages as I might like the phone service/support but not the broadband so keeping them separate is worth a premium. Fibre may change my mind though when I can get it - just have to compare the packages at the time and decide where my best value option is.

Many thanks for the responses.

Given we are living in a shared house, there will be four of us us splitting the cost which means that we are individually less sensitive to the price difference. I like the range of options that Be Unlimited offers, as pointed out in respect of SNR etc.
Sky unfortunately don't yet offer Fibre in our area otherwise that would probably tip the balance. Given their cheap prices and, by all accounts, decent service, it would seem to me that Sky are subsidising their broadband with their other services.
On a VM connection at the moment, meant to be 30MB, currently running at 6MB, but a very respectable 3MB upload - and this is an unthrottled connection (barely used).

i would love to know how u got this discount as if every one got it they would be bancrupt /i did not get this when i sign up to sky fibre/and i did ask they said the person should be sacked to have set this up for u

Sky give you 1100 ish upload if you let DLM run. So no advantage over BE.

Also if the lines VERY stable Sky's DLM can now set profiles equivalent to 3db noise margins. DLM is sky's dynamic line management.

THAT BEING SAID. Virginmedia is a no brainer. If it works well where you are you'll love it. The speeds are much better than the other two ISPs. Even when being subjected to their fair usage it's only a 75% reduction so it'll slow down to 15Mbps when you are restricted. Not too bad.

I would personally jump to the 100Mbps option. Might s'well.

Installation dates for virgin are better too.
I personally didn't get along well with virgin but given the alternatives they're good. They offer good speeds.

Their traffic management is largely laid out here http://www.virginmedia.com/images/STM_30Mb_above_800...

Edited by ukhardy07 (Wed 29-Aug-12 00:55:02)

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

i would love to know how u got this discount as if every one got it they would be bancrupt /i did not get this when i sign up to sky fibre/and i did ask they said the person should be sacked to have set this up for u

I have line rental for £1. They offset this when I upgraded to Sky fibre to offset the increase in price. I was 4 months into my 12 month contract.
I got this when I went through to cancellations as I said I was going to buy out of my standard Sky BB and switch to BT infinity. I would have done to be fair. This is valid for 12 months. I will ring back a few months after this expires and no doubt get another offer though at this stage (always have).

I also got my TV reduced to 50% discount (for 6 months) for having broadband slowdowns for 2 months (at the start of the year) due to my exchange having widely documented backhaul issues. This was via the executive team as I wrote a long documented complaint.

I've had sky for almost 10 years and pretty much always had a discount of some kind.

I moved my line rental across to Sky a few years ago as they offered me free line rental for 12 months and half price BB if I moved it over.

The way it works is quite strange though. Each person in cancellations has x amount of deals. So you may get through to somebody who had 10 offers available. They may have already given all of these away and therefore cannot offer you anything.

Ring back, get through to someone else. They may have just arrived and have a full 10 offers available to tempt you with. Don't succeed at first, hang up and ring back until you get somewhere.

Right now I have sky fibre pro 80/20, line rental, all TV (no movies or sport though) and I pay £44. This rises to £54 in January and £65ish in April 2012. I'll get another offer though I'm sure. The TV discount was only applied due to my issues with the service for 2months. BUT the line rental offers are across the board from what I gather.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Wed 29-Aug-12 01:04:25)