Virgin Media Discussion Thread

MartinPrince said:
I'm looking for something for my mum who's out of contract with Virgin. Where did you see/get this deal please?
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Vodafone also have decent renewal deals. If you put your mobile with them as well, you get another £4 discount. Best place to get Vodafone SIM only is mobiles.co.uk on a redemption plan, and you can just get the broadband direct or via somewhere that gives you cashback.
 
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MartinPrince said:
Many thanks, though the Vodaphone 500 deal listed there does include in contract price rises of £3 every April 1.
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Yeah the average monthly listed includes the £3 April increases, if you click on the Vodafone logo you'll see the breakdown

One thing I've noticed when it forwards to the Vodafone site it's £27 monthly not £26

I can take another £2 off per month being with talk mobile rolling monthly SIM not sure if that would effect the tcb £68 cashback though

Told virgin about it said can't match it , so after around 20 years being on cable tbf couldn't fault the service but with open reach arriving year ago have another option, only Vodafone sticks out all the rest providers are close or above virgin pricing
 
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uscool said:
Yeah the average monthly listed includes the £3 April increases, if you click on the Vodafone logo you'll see the breakdown

One thing I've noticed when it forwards to the Vodafone site it's £27 monthly not £26

I can take another £2 off per month being with talk mobile rolling monthly SIM not sure if that would effect the tcb £68 cashback though

Told virgin about it said can't match it , so after around 20 years being on cable tbf couldn't fault the service but with open reach arriving year ago have another option, only Vodafone sticks out all the rest providers are close or above virgin pricing
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I've been with Virgin (and their forebears) for a quarter of a century, and it pees me off immensely that I can't get their best deals.

Although the service has been good, because of the above, cannot wait to leave them.
 
Kelt said:
I've been with Virgin (and their forebears) for a quarter of a century, and it pees me off immensely that I can't get their best deals.

Although the service has been good, because of the above, cannot wait to leave them.
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this is the first year i havent been able to, i think i have been with them for 6 years, so either i have been unlucky this year or they have changed the way they deal with retentions now.

The good thing is that other providers are now building in my area, so when this 2 year contract runs out i will have more options. But chances are i might have moved house anyway, so that might be even more of a headache with virgin, who knows.
 
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Kelt said:
I've been with Virgin (and their forebears) for a quarter of a century, and it pees me off immensely that I can't get their best deals.

Although the service has been good, because of the above, cannot wait to leave them.
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Same here can't wait to get rid, but nothing is in the pipe-line very frustrating. We also used to get an uplift in speed every few years, thats all stopped as well now, been on 250Mbps for years!
 
I've also gave VM my notice because of this £4 monthly increase! Just plain greed.

Seems to be lots of fibre to choose from?
 
Over the past 2 weeks they’ve been rolling out new small green boxes and lots of fibre into the ducts in our village, but there’s been no sign of them running the fibre to the houses.

The wait continues…
 
I became fed up of seeing ads and decided to do something about my lack of configurable DNS on the 5x situation*. I purchased a XikeStor SKS8310-8X - which is a dirt cheap 10Gb 8-port managed switch. I already had some 10/5/2.5/1GbE SFPs lying around. That switch is now connected to the 10Gb port on the 5x, then that switch is connected to my original ethernet setup (10Gb capable but currently a mix of 2.5Gb and 1Gb). I have tested connecting at 2.5Gb from my PC and managed to top out Virgin's 1.1Gbps throughput which was good confirmation. The switch is capable but has no descriptors at all - it is on you to figure out config elements, dependencies, etc.. Not too bad once you're in the swing of it.

There was a moment when I started looking at 2.5Gb switches instead but, for the price difference, futureproofing with 10Gb ports for not much extra made sense to me. It also means that I don't need to upgrade a switch again if I want to go over 2.5Gb - I just need to upgrade my interfaces.

My attempt to create two separate network segments failed abysmally when I realised that I couldn't configure any static routes on the 5x. Did I mention how incredibly basic this router is? I had no choice but to remain with a single subnet and segment. This will change in the future. Alas, I have setup DHCP on the XikeStor switch and finally have my DNS requests hitting Pi-hole - hallelujah. No more ads. DHCP: one less thing the 5x is doing.

Having added this into my equipment list it means that, in the future, I can acquire a WAS-110 and eliminate the 5x entirely. I look forward to that moment.

The switch was £118 and sadly didn't come with any rack mount ears despite having fixing points for them. It does have a fan which will also actively cool any inserted SFPs - this will be beneifical for the WAS-110 that runs notoriously hot. I'll do another update once I have the WAS-110 in my possession and have connected some more devices at 2.5Gb. My existing NICs top out at 2.5Gb and there aren't many 10Gb options on the market that aren't overkill for my needs; I'll wait for progress to be made in that area. There are those 10GbE Realtek NICs popping up from China but there were too many reports of general power saving features not working correctly - which defeats the point of having the power efficient NIC in the first place. I'm sure some of the more known networking brands will start producing NICs based on the Realtek chipset in the future.

*Yes, I could've configured DNS settings manually on each device, but then I have no excuse to invest in new equipment!!
 
the Zen CEO likes the sound of his own voice, always see him comment on this or that, just likes his name out there doesnt he lol, there are already altnets that don't increase pricing etc

to keep it VM related, had 2000/2000 for £45 cancelled it, was waiting on giffgaff to allow preinstalls to sign up, (£35 for 1000/1000 no contract) but signed up 2 days later with VM for 1000/1000 for £31 and it included Netflix, We used to have Netflix and paid in a foreign currency since 2018, but since they stopped that, we still haven't watched it, good ol plex.
 
Smir said:
the Zen CEO likes the sound of his own voice, always see him comment on this or that, just likes his name out there doesnt he lol, there are already altnets that don't increase pricing etc

to keep it VM related, had 2000/2000 for £45 cancelled it, was waiting on giffgaff to allow preinstalls to sign up, (£35 for 1000/1000 no contract) but signed up 2 days later with VM for 1000/1000 for £31 and it included Netflix, We used to have Netflix and paid in a foreign currency since 2018, but since they stopped that, we still haven't watched it, good ol plex.
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They exist, but he is calling for it to be mandatory, which logically he is right.

A typical broadband contract is lock in for the consumer and opt out to the provider, its really one sided. It should be they have a choice between lock in or regular price increases, but instead they get both slices of the pie.
 
New Broadband connection set up, also got netflix set up. I beleive netflix is only for new accounts? i am not sure as i never had it on my old one for free. Struggling to get volt to work, cannot get past new customer screen at the moment to turn it on, so "Only" on 500mb right now
 
After 20 or so years, it's goodbye to virign. I've only stuck with them so long because they offered much faster broadband than anyone else, but finally I have th option of FTTH. Contract expires on 9th Jan and so far their best offer for 1 GB is £60 after the April price rise. Compare that to BT who are offering £41 after the April price rise and it's a no brainer.

I'm not going to bother with the cancel and get a better offer dance because a company that makes it that hard doesn't deserve to get my business. They've screwed me on prices for years because of no better alternative, currently paying £50 for 250Mb which is outrageous but the best I can get.

Parting is going to be sweet, with no sorrow.
 
ahar said:
After 20 or so years, it's goodbye to virign. I've only stuck with them so long because they offered much faster broadband than anyone else, but finally I have th option of FTTH. Contract expires on 9th Jan and so far their best offer for 1 GB is £60 after the April price rise. Compare that to BT who are offering £41 after the April price rise and it's a no brainer.

I'm not going to bother with the cancel and get a better offer dance because a company that makes it that hard doesn't deserve to get my business. They've screwed me on prices for years because of no better alternative, currently paying £50 for 250Mb which is outrageous but the best I can get.

Parting is going to be sweet, with no sorrow.
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We did the same at start of year, I can't remember how long we were with VM but it was from Ntl and possibly telewest days, once FTTP was rolled out in our area it opened up so many alternatives. Its so nice not having to deal with the yearly contract dance and letters in the post about in contract price rises.
 
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Phemo said:
Finally, it looks like Virgin have managed to get a contractor to arrange the connection point outside my house on Monday/Tuesday according to roadworks.org and BIDB. We've had £85 put on the account as an apology and to cover mobile data use and there should be further compensation on top too.

By the time Tuesday comes around it'll be at 83 days, plus another week or so maybe for them to get a VM engineer to do the actual connection and it's likely to be around 90 days. According to the Ofcom automatic compensation I should be due £6.24 for every day since original missed service date so that's about £560, on top of the £85 credit they've put on my account. Surely I'm not really going to end up with £645 out of this?
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Well unsurprisingly and in typical Virgin Media fashion this all went weirdly. I did indeed have a contractor turn up outside my house on that day and they had temp traffic lights up and they dug up the pavement to install a toby box right up against my wall. Popped the cover off and there's a rope there for them to pull cable through. A right result I thought.

Except the other day we got a call saying that they're going to cancel our contract and that they won't be installing it because the costs would be too high. I mentioned that they've now dug up the pavement and I have a point outside my house but they seem to believe that the work is unrelated to my house.



Quite how this can be anything other than VM for my house I don't know. But it looks like they've finally given up even though it seems that the bulk of the work is done. Really weird.

Thankfully I have gig fibre anyway so I'm fine on the Internet front, but I wanted VM TV back since Sky Stream is pretty awful. Oh well.
 
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ahar said:
After 20 or so years, it's goodbye to virign. I've only stuck with them so long because they offered much faster broadband than anyone else, but finally I have th option of FTTH. Contract expires on 9th Jan and so far their best offer for 1 GB is £60 after the April price rise. Compare that to BT who are offering £41 after the April price rise and it's a no brainer.

I'm not going to bother with the cancel and get a better offer dance because a company that makes it that hard doesn't deserve to get my business. They've screwed me on prices for years because of no better alternative, currently paying £50 for 250Mb which is outrageous but the best I can get.

Parting is going to be sweet, with no sorrow.
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That's an outrageous price, I'm currently on around £38 for 1GB, and I'm peed off paying that much!
 
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