Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

[Spud1]

In my experience it depends on what products you are comparing...and what metrics you want to use.

You can't compare sky's DSL product to the Virgin cable one - Virgin will win nearly every time since it tops out at 50mb (100 in some places), compared to a 24mb limit for Sky's DSL. DSL is also much more succeptable to problems with BTs network (which are very very common), wheras cable just isn't, as its well, cable.

If I could get Virgin cable I would be on it like a shot - but as it is I can only get DSL, so as a result I am with sky. I've had my share of problems, but their support team is actually really good once you get through to CSR - they know what they are on about and actually understand when you tell them you have an external NTE-5 box..it's a basic thing yes but I have been really impressed with their CSR support team.

Virgin's DSL product just isn't the same, its poor from what I know with very average support, and quite expensive compared to sky.

Things will change when sky roll out their fibre network, but not expecting this until next year at the very earliest, so for now..the two are not comparable imo. If you can get cable, go for it (internet only I hasten to add - Virgin's TV "service" is still terrible!), otherwise the Sky DSL product is amongst the best in the market.

[JKL]

totally agree with Spud1, for ADSL go with SKY or BE

[watercooled]

Sky FTTC? Or do they mean they'll be using BT's equipment?

[dangel]

Sky FTTC? Or do they mean they'll be using BT's equipment?

Both (but not FTTC)

Sky Unlimited is using LLU (i.e. sky have exchange equipment in place) and tops out at 20mbit - I have this (and full speed yay!). I get ~2100kb/sec at peak times, zero complaints so far.

Sky Connect (and other packages) use BT's network in areas where not LLU is available. This sucks ass usually and is why Sky have a bad rep for broadband.

The interesting thing is you can use LLU just for broadband, and the phone can stay with BT (or whoever) even though you're going through sky's equipment in the exchange.

[watercooled]

Oh, no I thought I was unaware of some move by Sky to roll out FTTC or something.

[crossy]

A little advice needed here.

Me and my friend got into a stupid "pub" arguement about internet providers. Yes, I know, stupid. But anyway, he uses SKY and i'm a customer of Virgin Media. He seems to think SKY is the better provider but in my opinion they are both the same.

So what do we think? SKY or Virgin?

That's an easy one to settle - if you want good support avoid Virgin, if you want the best speeds then avoid Sky.
I've been with Telewest/VM for a long, long time and I've found that I get pretty good speeds and incredible reliability (total of four days outage in more than 10 years). I'm also lucky enough that I get pretty consistent timings too, plus I'm a light enough user that FUP doesn't bite me in the ass. And heck, when I asked if I could use this connection to telework/work-from-home I was told that this "wasn't an issue" and even running development servers locally doesn't tip me into the throttling.

I recently upgraded from "L" to "XL" (so that's 10->30Mb/s) and although I'm getting smaller actual:theoretical ratios on the speeds I'm pretty chilled, (I saw 1.25MB/s being reported on my L line - which is near as dammit the rated speed). Just run speedtest and here's the results.

It tickles me that the upload speed is apparently more than the rated speed for my connection. This test was run with me having two active clients connected to the SuperHub over Devolo powerline ethernet adapters, so maybe a direct (cable) connection would be a little faster on the download. Compare that with the best that I can get via BT's lines - which is a pathetic 3Mb/s - heck my mobile can get 50%+ of that speed.

But seriously, Virgin's support is just dire... I really, really, really wish that they'd in-source it again.

Virgin's DSL product just isn't the same, its poor from what I know with very average support, and quite expensive compared to sky.

Yep, me dad was on that, but moved to BT - better speeds and faaarrrrr better support - and cheaper to boot. E.g. he'd phone up Virgin, explain that he'd got a problem that someone was trying to sort for him, then pass the phone to me to "talk tech" and the Virgin techdroid then refused to talk to me. So we ended up with the stupid situation where da' was acting as a go-between.

[Agent]

Sky Connect (and other packages) use BT's network in areas where not LLU is available. This sucks ass usually and is why Sky have a bad rep for broadband.

Spot on - The LLU package is very good.
We have both Virgin and Syk LLU in this house.

Virgin is 'faster' because it doesn't have the pitfalls of ADSL, but VM's support is shocking.
Skys support is excellent and the speed is solid / fast, but only to the given rate by ADSL.