Virgin Media and O2 merger agreed

[gagaga]

Now to get rid of that Virgin branding and deny the begging tax dodger his £10m a year...

[IAmATeaf]

Does beardy actually have anything to do with virgin media except maybe collecting fees for the use of the name?

[3dcandy]

Does beardy actually have anything to do with anything except maybe collecting fees for the use of the name?

Fixed for you

[Iota]

If two different companies condense to one company there is less choice of contract, rates etc.

Agreed

It also a joke to consider 'competition' when you need more than one cable connecting to your property to get real competition.

Fair point, there isn't a huge overlap on that front, but there are some on the services provided.

Mobile phones / mobile phone contracts they overlap, mobile broadband they overlap on and that's pretty much it. I wouldn't be surprised if Ofcom forced one of them to sell off those parts to smaller competition as a condition of the sale (not BT / Vodafone / EE etc) to retain some form of competition on that front.

As to the TV services and broadband services, that point is moot as you actually have to have Virgin cabling in your respective area to receive those services.

[spacein_vader]

What may count in their favour is that Virgin are only an MVNO in the mobile space and so the loss of one virtual operator is unlikely to affect competition as there are so many, if they operated their own network and 4 were becoming 3 that'd be harder.

The reverse is true in broadband. O2 are just an Openreach reseller, Virgin build out their own network. So the same number of "real" networks remains the same and one less openreach reseller/MVNO is unlikely to dillute competition much.

[SylvanSagacious]

O2 are the slowest to drop prices or offer more value for the same cost. Virgin offered great value, at first glance, but closer inspection of their terms and you realised how limited their tarrifs were.

EE is probably the best current provider in terms of service/value.

[HacKage]

Not really had great experiences with either company. Like another user posted, I got a "free" speed upgrade to 150Mbps on Virgin but to be honest I had so many issues with it dropping that if you took an average speed over the month, i'd have probably been better with one of the 76Mbps options elsewhere.

[IAmATeaf]

I’m in Virgin broadband and the biggest issue is that if you have an area issue then they are really slow to fix. I’ve suffered over subscribed issues where at peak times speeds dropped down to 1-2Mbs and in each case it took them over a year to fix. The only reason I stayed with them was that the speeds were fine off peak and while they were unable to fix the issues they halved my monthly costs.

[3dcandy]

I’m in Virgin broadband and the biggest issue is that if you have an area issue then they are really slow to fix. I’ve suffered over subscribed issues where at peak times speeds dropped down to 1-2Mbs and in each case it took them over a year to fix. The only reason I stayed with them was that the speeds were fine off peak and while they were unable to fix the issues they halved my monthly costs.

To be fair it's like that with many providers...
I'm lucky - 500 meg here and very few slowdowns though lockdown has caused issues for us with streaming tv just because it appears everyone is now streaming

[philehidiot]

Does beardy actually have anything to do with virgin media except maybe collecting fees for the use of the name?

Beardy is basically now the Space Core. (Yeh, I was playing Portal recently).

[3dcandy]

Beardy is basically now the Space Core. (Yeh, I was playing Portal recently).

Space Beardy Boy?