Sky or Virgin?

[Soulassassin]

Thinking of jumping ship from BT/Sky/Be to Virgin but have a few questions.
First my setup, I have Sky hd with espn and this costs £72 (approx i think). This is plugged into a splitter and goes upstairs along with a coax cable with one of those mouse things plugged in so I can control and watch the sky+ upstair or downstairs. Bethere is £18 odd (I get about 12Mb) and BT line rental is about £13 with calls on top of that.
So thats £110 with a few calls.

The virgin deal is a tivo box and seperate hd box for another room, all channels including espn, 100Mb broadband and phone with calls included at £104 (Half price for 1st 6 months)
I was waiting for BT infinity but since they are dragging there heels getting it here bollocks to them.

So virgin seems the much better deal but I need to be able to watch and control things recorded on the tivo up or downstairs. Is this possible? preferably without a remote extender.
Im prolly gonna phone sky and see what deal they are willing to give and I think Im tied to BT for a few more months before I can move.

Whats everybodys views on the Sky vs Virgin? Preferably from ppl who have had both.

[littlebilly1]

I prefer virgin media, had sky for 2 years prior to virgin and have never thought about switching back.
I currently pay £60 per month for XL TV in 3 rooms (TiVo,V+HD,V HD), 60MB broadband and talk evening and weekends.


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[flumperino]

Do it for the broadband alone...sky broadband is donkey snot.

[Mobileman]

I find sky bb bloody great 17.5 mb unlimited and no throttling and dl couple hundred gig a month, each to there own though

[Nibb]

Do it for the broadband alone...sky broadband is donkey snot.

Bollocks ....I had real issues with my speed 3MB and Sky gave me a personal contact who rang me regularly until it was sorted....now rock solid @17MB and they gave a 12months line rental @£3/month rather than £12.95 due to the inconvenience!

Cant fault their CS recently!

[gandalf72]

Totally agree with Nibb - Sky customer care was fantastic with me after what can only be described as shambolic install non attempts by Campbell and Kennedy in Glasgow. This company (C&K) must be the worlds worst company ever to deal with. Failed to turn up with proper equipment despite being made to pay for the proper equipment up front due to height of flat (3rd floor), 2 failed engineer visits, ladders being available but workers sent off on other jobs leaving non qualified engineers only available to do sky jobs. I could go on and on about failure of that lot. C&K also hung up on sky folk twice!! when they tried to contact them.

Got a phone call form sky customer services about the whole experience and ended up with half price for a few months and an upgrade in tv package free. We were previously with virgin and we had issues with the broadband where after you downloaded a film the fair usage policy would either kick in straight away meaning the 10mb speed we had dropped down to 1.5mb speed either during if size of file was bigger than 1.5gb or after if we tried to download another item. Also experienced a few days outage during the year for a couple of times.

Touch wood had no issue with sky other than having to restart router every morning or every few days due to it not connecting and giving dns errors in chrome. Other than that though everything has been brilliant pretty much getting constant speeds and can download to my hearts content without worrying about the fair usage policy.

I think the tv channels as well that are exclusive to sky are better on sky than what is exclusive to virgin.

I guess its all down to what is more important to you, if you download a lot then I would say Sky win hands down due to virgins stupid fair usage policy.
TV wise its probably evens on picture quality maybe virgin just narrow ahead. TV packages wise probably sky wins that one.

We were a virgin customer for over 8 years and found there customer service to be poor - no call back to try and save our custom - more than happy to cancel our account without asking any questions or attempt to save account. Seems they are only really interested in new customers was our impression.

Had Sky now for about 4 months and have to say had no issues with TV and minor one for broadband but we are paying less money for more than what we got with virgin and for me the internet and downloading speeds constant is worth the minor irratation of having to reset the router to clear the dns / connection issues that seem to happen every few days.

I think as well with virgin there is little point in having fast speeds with internet browsing when they stick the fair usage policy on as it really feels like you go back in time to the dark days of dial up in comparison.

[flumperino]

I guess everybody has different experiences. My dealings with Sky customer services have been really bad and I'll be glad to go back to VM. Plus I do really miss the consistent 30MB line.

Still that's why it is good that there is more than one company on offer, we can go with who we want.

[Brydo666]

I've used both and can honestly say I've had no major issues with either - whichever one you choose won't be a bad choice.

My preference is Virgin Media.

[Mystical_2K]

if you want faster broadband speeds then i believe Virgin is your choice, however Sky have better TV stuff so i am told

i went with virgin for their broadband, 100Mb BB, Lowest TV Package, Line Rental and free weekend calls for £48

[tiggerbiker]

i prefer my sky tv setup and uncapped broadband - but would like virgin broadband speed to go with it

[greens117]

Bollocks ....I had real issues with my speed 3MB and Sky gave me a personal contact who rang me regularly until it was sorted....now rock solid @17MB and they gave a 12months line rental @£3/month rather than £12.95 due to the inconvenience!

Cant fault their CS recently!

What speed was you meant to get?

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[Waka]

Sky are fucking shysters, they 'promised' me between 10 and 20 Mbps. While I'm not naive enough to think I would get anywhere near 20, I'm lucky to get 5Mbps!
Even Virgins lowest speed when it has been capped will be better than that!

As soon as I've squeezed a good enough deal from Virgin I'm off. The few TV channels that are on Sky and not Virgin I couldn't give a stuff about and the on-demand stuff on Virgin is light years ahead of Skys feeble attempt.

[Soulassassin]

So is there a way to watch and control tivo recorded stuff in another room?
Bit of a deal breaker for me if you can't.

[Over Carl]

Had sky for a few years, only got 3.5Mb but it never ever went down. Moved to virgin for about 2 1/2 years - we had solid 10Mb for a while, but by the end it was going down at least once a month for up to a week, and customer services were seriously messing up each ticket so we moved back to sky.

Been with them nearly a year, had 3 outages, 2 where between 3-4am and only lasted 15-30 mins, the other was around 6.30 - 10.45am.

(I've got equipment monitoring my line to tell me if it goes down even if I'm not surfing).

[Mule]

Without a TV sender you can't watch recorded stuff elsewhere, however, from what I've read they're going to update it at some point so you can access the tivo recordings from any extra boxes you have.

You can set recordings from anywhere, there's an online tv guide you can use to remotely set them, I've only done it via my laptop but I think you can use a phone as well.

[Nibb]

Ill give you the Executive Support Team email address if you want

[Nibb]

Sky are fucking shysters, they 'promised' me between 10 and 20 Mbps. While I'm not naive enough to think I would get anywhere near 20, I'm lucky to get 5Mbps!
Even Virgins lowest speed when it has been capped will be better than that!

As soon as I've squeezed a good enough deal from Virgin I'm off. The few TV channels that are on Sky and not Virgin I couldn't give a stuff about and the on-demand stuff on Virgin is light years ahead of Skys feeble attempt.

You cant compare a LLU copper wire broadband service to a cable supplier FFS

[Nibb]

What speed was you meant to get?

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk 2

Up to 18MB....I was getting 12MB but it dropped to 3MB due to line issue and a dodgy router....all sorted now!

[Mule]

Don't forget to do quidco BTW.
http://www.quidco.com/virgin-media/
http://www.quidco.com/sky-digital-tv-and-broadband/

Also, I wouldn't bother with 100mb bb, at 60mb I can download a film in a minute and a half, doesn't seem worth any extra cash to me to reduce that to a minute.

[Waka]

You cant compare a LLU copper wire broadband service to a cable supplier FFS

Yes I can coz neither BT nor Sky have fibre available in my area and they don't even have a implementation date :-( :-p