Unless they've changed drastically, the Virgin phone line is compulsory.
We've been on Virgin since they first offered Broadband and I don't have a major issue with them. I have in the past, but generally, day in-day out the service works fine.
It's one of those that when it's working it's fine. When it isn't, it really doesn't work and can be a pain to get it fixed.
You'll find this with pretty much any broadband provider.
We have Claranet/BT provide three ADSL (broadband) lines for us at work. They're higher grade lines than consumer ones and we've had two sites that took almost six months to get working properly. Days and days of downtime and a nightmare of liaising between the people who provide the actual service and BT.
The problem is that the line from your property to the exchange is owned by BT. The equipment that connects in your house and in the exchange belongs to whoever you pay. If you're with Sky say and have an issue you call Sky. They will check the equipment, but will often pass the issue onto BT as a line issue. Then BT will test it and say "nothing wrong, we can send an engineer out for £100 to make sure though". So you go back to Sky who try rebooting modems and stuff and maybe send you out a new router or something. The problem is that you can get caught between the two. Often broadband providers use BT as a convenient scapegoat (which is what we've had).
However, on our other site the service has been spot on for five years and just the odd "reboot the router" issue. We also had BT provided broadband at a satellite office in Burnham and that was fine for two years, with Wifi without a single blip. Brilliant service.
My folks have Talk Talk and have had a nightmare with them. The call centres and support are dreadful and I eventually fixed their issue by dismantling the BT installed phone points and sorting out a bad connection. In that case it wasn't really anyone's fault, but you learn about piss-poor service.
the-inlaws-of_furie had Sky broadband and TV and have recently moved to Virgin. They get more for less and the broadband works. Before, the broadband provided by Sky was abysmal, but I know that a lot of Stafford struggles because BT provided broadband is poor. They're putting in BT Infinity now which will help though.
So, that tells you what? That sometimes they're good and sometimes they're bad. No help at all :lol:
I think you'll find you see more people complaining about Virgin simply because by default, Virgin are a bigger collective. If 100 people on here have broadband, probably 50% have Virgin and 50% have ADSL of some form (broadband over a BT owned line). The difference is that of the ADSL people, 5 may use BT, 10 Sky, 5 Talk Talk, 10 Zen, 10 those Hull communication pillocks and 10 Orange. So if Sky Broadband goes down, you hear about it less. It's simple economies of scale.
There are sites available that show you what the average broadband speed is in your area and through which providers. Sometimes they have ratings too for uptime, quality, etc. It's worth finding two or three of these sites and getting a feel for what your area is like and then making a decision based on that.
For TV, there's very little difference. The Virgin Tivo box is excellent and I think better than the Sky+ HD box, but Sky tend to offer slightly better services over their network and they employ local agents to do installs; so you tend to get a much more professional service and support than with Virgin. With Sky, it always used to be that after a year you owned the box though, so if it blew up you had to pay to replace it. With Virgin it's a permanent rental.
Does that cover it? :lol:
