Personally i have often been a dual subscriber to sly and cable, as has been mentioned here cable BB is pretty much unbeatable, there phone is a fooin disgrace tbh lol.
The cable tv service is pretty much crap, there tiering from M to XL makes no sense as far as lineup is concerned - doubtless intended to force us to choose XL lineups.
if we then have to look at the XL lineup we have to compare it to the 6 entertainment packs from sky. Who currently appear to have a better lineup and better deals on a 12months basis. how ever it has to be said that virgin are offering curently 2 months free on there services BB and TV however this does not include and phone services that may be bundled.
From this we have to conclude the inescapable truth of our domestic service providers of the following; There customer support is good until one is actually a subscriber, sky attach little value to existing customer retention, while VM will make deals to retain out of contract Sky often do not (they do however immediately on cancellation send atractive offers lol).
It is abundantly clear there is insufficient provider competition to ensure we actually get good value for our tv services provisions, basically we get ripped off by a margin imo of some 35% at least.
This leaves most of us bargain hunters with a bit of a dilema, in the past many may have chosen to relieve virgin of the dilema of offering decent bundled services discounts by selecting them as a provider and enhancing the package with self obtained tv packages.
Allowing top tier BB and phone consumption and a free minimal tv allowance basically foc.
If one then can no longer keep the phone on a top tier then expect to be ripped to bits with charges, especially in a world of 0845 and 0871 numbers!!! the scam here is the connection charge and that is why the phone is plied so heavily imo, also the weekend calls to virgin mobiles a while back got massaged into double the cost and went largely unnoticed by many of us. You still can't beat a good old BT landline. unfortunately we can't go near em for BB becuase they throttle BitTorrent to death, the speed is all over the place, and they sneaked in a little thing called a termination charge with the agreement of ofcom apparently at the end of last year - a charge which has more than doubled in a year infact!!!
The best qaulity of service full package arranges in the following way in my view therefore;
BT for landline - best for overall pricing although i am not awre of sky's offering here
Broadband - By miles the 50meg Virgin offering not so pricey when you look at BT's offerings
Tv Packages - channels llineup as a uk provider alone is unrivalled, making use of offers can reduce the costs!!
All 3 of the above offerings are the prime sevices for entertainment, phone and Broadband, but if you run with all those you are getting hammered on costs.
The end result for Virgin is a huge reliance on there broadband attractiveness, i must admit it is enough to keep me interested in them although this 0845 business is getting very tiresome since those numbers do not fit into my huge mobile free minutes packages either.
On the basis of my somewhat shaky review here, it is very hard to see how virgin are likely to do anything other than drive these people currently watching there services for free, straight into the open arms of Mr Murdoch if they are not currently making use of the broadband packages from virgin... in my considered opinion they would be crazy not to go to sky lol. Lets not forget that base tier BB on virgin is also comparable to SLy's extremely low cost offering for high tier customers with BT landlines, high tiers are doable with discounts currently being offered as well!!!
These 2 providers are clearly gearing up to nail us all to the wall in 2011 with unfavourable pricing structures.. right now the governments wants us all digital, they look good with these great offers but when they have us all they will screw us - they always do.
