We’ve only had minor outages with Sky (we have tv, phone & adsl with them) and they’ve only lasted a few mins at a time. Other than that, no probs with them whatsoever
We pay Sky £49.50 a month for tv (all packages except movies & sport), their max adsl & phone line rental plus unlimted calls (which now includes 0845 and I believe 0870).
virgin has a very very fast BB service there 10 MB connection is very quick BUT their support centre is a bag off toss, and it has a nasty habit of slowing down, and if you like to download a lot for Boinc or any other reason then you will get your speeds choked worse than a lonley middle aged mans chicken. my advice, steer clear of virgin
Currently on the Virgin 10MB service. No problems with general browsing. I find it very reliable, much more so than ADSL when I was on that. About the only complaint I have is the uplink is rather tight. Not sure exactly what it is, but it isn’t much. So if you ever upload much of anything, you either would need to look at a higher package or stick with ADSL.
thanks for the advice so far… discussions at home are around the 3 options now…
BT rental + ADSL2 + SkyHD (most expensive, possibly best HD package)
Virgin for everything, broadband putting me off and potentially less HD goodness
BT rental + ADSL2 + PVR freesat box (humix thingy) but this is an unknown quantity to both of us despite the good reviews. PVR box is about £220, so would pay for itself in 9 months of cancelled sky subs
[QUOTE=Spaceboy;446025]thanks for the advice so far… discussions at home are around the 3 options now…
BT rental + ADSL2 + SkyHD (most expensive, possibly best HD package)
Virgin for everything, broadband putting me off and potentially less HD goodness
BT rental + ADSL2 + PVR freesat box (humix thingy) but this is an unknown quantity to both of us despite the good reviews. PVR box is about £220, so would pay for itself in 9 months of cancelled sky subs ;)[/QUOTE]
I have an older version of the Humax PVR (9200T) Best purchase I’ve made in years, hasn’t missed a beat even though the early code was a bit iffy - had two code updates in the past few years. You can record two programs at once and watch a third ( it has to be on the same MUX as one of the two recording ) with a lot of other goodies ie chase play etc . I’m going to upgrade to the 9300T — £164 at Dixons and give the old one to the wrinklies when I buy a new TV, even they should be able to use it.
I used to have virgin but had to change to Sky as they hadn’t updated the local exchange for digital. Had a damn fine BB connection and had very few issues with it. Had virgin upgraded the exchange, I’d still be with them.
Im with Virgin… I get everything with it… all the HD and all the channels also 10mb broadband I really cannot find anything to fault it… yes there are caps on the amount you can download… but if you download a lot just do it overnight
Support is a bit iffy as its always John Smith from India on the other end… but Ive never had much reason to phone them anyway
Only good thing to come from V/media is the idiocy of the support centre.
Unscrew the unput cable from the modem at a random time during the day, ring tech support and complain about connection loss.
Rinse - repeat for a few days
Call the customer cancellation line and claim all sorts of goodies / discounts for the next 12 months
never had a problem with downloads on the virgin 10mb service (never been down for more than 1/2 hour and that was only once), upload is only 512 i believe so if uploading is needed you will find it lacking, sky customer support is as bad as virgin! (i will not forget the guy telling me to disconnect the phoneline i was talking to him on :sigh:,) we get phone, 10mb broadband and basic telly thrown in for nothing all for £24.99. i think my dad did the do it or how long does it take to cancel a few times when needing things changed or sorted and they speak to supervisors and come up with miraculous deals,
Virgin here, only thing I’ve had (apart from the first 3 months when I was on Madasafish dial up )
Phone, 10meg BB, Medium TV = around the £33 a month area (bills average £45 with calls & VAT)
problems … in the early years we had a couple of disruptive outages in the area, both which I believe were due to ‘upgrades’ - one left us with no net access for a few days, the other intermittently reduced speeds to dial-up performance for about a month. Nothing of any consequence over the last few years though.
As mentioned earlier by Curly, cableforum is your first port of call before customer support
I think we’re holding fire a bit until the price of either freesat PVRs comes down, or Sky reduce the cost of their HD stuff.
Been put off Virgin due to throttle limits, customer support, less HD content and the hassle we’d have getting BT to disconnect our phone in a rented property.
