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50-50 joint venture will create a major rival to BT. Deal is valued at £31.4 billion.
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Read more.Quote:
50-50 joint venture will create a major rival to BT. Deal is valued at £31.4 billion.
Ahhh we have Virgin media and o2 contracts ;)
Beardy and O2. Hmmm..... I have to say it'd be nice to have something to give BT a kick. The problem is that I think they may end up competing on poor customer service rather than real products.
My thoughts exactly.Quote:
Originally Posted by philehidiot
To be fair I've found them OK. Not great, not bad but thoroughly ok.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tabbykatze
Better than quite a few others. TalkTalk cough, 3 cough
With what is going on around the airlines, maybe it is time to change the name away from Virgin? I am not sure if O2 is a strong enough brand for quad play services though.
o2 valued at 13 ish billion virgin at 18ish billion...Quote:
Originally Posted by mark_a_scott
Company value does not equate to strength of brand perception.Quote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandyo2 valued at 13 ish billion virgin at 18ish billion...Quote:
Originally Posted by mark_a_scott
it sure doesn't but also has some weight...
;)
I feel like a Sky and Three tie up has to be in the offing at some point.
hope not. Three aren't too bad. Sky really really are and you know which corporate structure will win in that merger!Quote:
Originally Posted by jim
re Virgin and O2 - I'm surprised at this. How is that not loss of competition? Historically virgin have offered a different option to O2 irrespective of the network they piggy-back on, so that is reduced consumer choice and loss of competition. If two different companies condense to one company there is less choice of contract, rates etc. Virgin historically have proven to be far more competitive than the network brands although that has diminished in recent years. Take away valid competitors of any size and the big boys can easily price hike. How is that a good thing exactly?
Let face it we're on a rush to merge down to 3 or 4 big players and maybe a few niche players. Its great from a price point (at least until we drop down to the last 3 but rubbish from a quality of service point of view with the rush to the bottom. It also a joke to consider \'competition\' when you need more than one cable connecting to your property to get real competition.
This, I fear, is the truth.Quote:
Originally Posted by philehidiot
The agreement does seem ridiculously quick, given the first announcement of the talks had them stating that there is no guarantee that they'll come to a deal. But perhaps that's just something they had to say to cover themselves against the shareholders.
I don't really think it's less competition.Quote:
Originally Posted by ik9000
Virgin is piggybacking off EE, as you say. However you spin it, we have four mobile networks in the UK. Given that we almost lost that previously when 3 and O2 were talking about merging, I think this might be a better way round the problem.
As long as OFCOM keep on top of making switching easy (and they've done a hell of a lot in that space over the last few years), it could actually end up being more competitive than before.
Right now BT is the only player that can truly offer broadband, TV and mobile in the same package - because they have infrastructure in each area.
Virgin has its cable network for broadband and TV, but no mobile - they're reliant on BT for that.
Vodafone has some broadband (via OpenReach) and mobile (admittedly no TV of their own).
Sky has broadband (again via OpenReach) and TV, but no mobile of their own.
If Virgin and O2 merge, and Sky combined with Three, then you've got four players who can have meaningful competition with BT. To my mind, that has to be preferable to say Three and O2 merging.
Been a Virgin Media fibre broadband and TV customer with no issues at all, The free upgrade in speed from 100MB/s to 150mb/s was awesome and not sure why they get dissed so much. Yes, their customer service can suck but that pretty much goes for most of these big companies...I hear the same complaints for them all. They are all big enough and dont really care about their customers.
Anyway this will be a good thing for the UK.
Now to get rid of that Virgin branding and deny the begging tax dodger his £10m a year...
Does beardy actually have anything to do with virgin media except maybe collecting fees for the use of the name?
Fixed for youQuote:
Originally Posted by IAmATeaf
AgreedQuote:
Originally Posted by ik9000
Fair point, there isn't a huge overlap on that front, but there are some on the services provided.Quote:
Originally Posted by cheesemp
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...Quote:
Originally Posted by IAmATeaf
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
Beardy is basically now the Space Core. (Yeh, I was playing Portal recently).Quote:
Originally Posted by IAmATeaf
Space Beardy Boy?Quote:
Originally Posted by philehidiot
;)