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Thread: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

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    Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    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?

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Neither.........!
    But, if those were all i could get, it would be Sky.

    At least if anything went wrong, i could speak with someone in the UK from Sky. With VM, you get flung around the Asian sub-continent talking to various guises of 'Gary' or 'Alistair'.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Virgin I found is best, hardly any issues with them and bonus of not needing a phone line is another winner for me over BT.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    The only issue I have with Virgin Media is their troubleshooting solutions. None of them ever work! You sit on the phone for an hour talking to someone 10,000 miles away to then get "Sorry, we can't help you."

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Everyone I know who is on Sky wants to move, a few of them were sold the package almost guaranteeing 20Mbps and they end up with a rubbish, slow, unreliable connection (i've had a few 'I told you so' moments ). Personally I'd be phoning them, claiming I was mis-sold the package and breaking the contract.
    Virgin Media on the other hand, while the first stage of customer services leaves much to be desired, don't forget they are a huge company and most of the people who phone will have forgotten to turn their computer on or something, so it makes sense to have a cheap contract to deal with most people then pass you on so someone in the UK for any real problems, that's my experience anyway. Virgin Media's actual network is pretty much unbeatable at the moment, I don't know anyone that gets considerably less less than the advertised speed. You do pay more for VM but you get what you pay for, it's actually good value for money on most of the packages unless you live close enough to an exchange to get >15Mbps through DSL.

    So out of the two, I'd say VM is the best by miles.

    Edit: Oh perhaps I should mention, if all you want the connection for is occasional browsing, telling people when you go to the toilet etc then pretty much any cheap package will do, but there are better options than Sky.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Virgin Media's cable broadband is normally good, I've not had any complaint although reading the cable forums there are plenty of people that don't share my experiance.

    Their TV service though also has some significant advantages. They have considerable on-demand facilities which are very nice, their V+ box has 3 tuners which is a definate win and you don't need a dish stuck on your house. They also have a new box (TiVo powered) coming soon which could be really good. (It could be awful as well, we'll see)

    As for customer service, I have found VM's to be passable at best. Faults get fixed, I've never needed any real tech support though. Their pricing system is outragous though. They never update anyones price, what you start buying the service for is what you always pay and their customer service can't do anything about it. You can sometimes get prices sorted by going through their retentions dept but not always. (I'd hate to be involved in developing or supporting their billing system. ) I've never been a customer of Sky so I can't comment on what they are like.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    You do hear negative stuff about VM, but they have a huge customer base, and how many people sign up to a forum to say something nice about a company?
    But yeah, I do agree about their pricing system and support, it needs some major work...

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Having just gone from this on Sky

    To this on virgin


    I would have to say Virgin, in terms of customer support, Sky were absolutely horrendous. It took over 20+ phone calls to Sky each on average of half an hour for me to eventually track down the fault myself, needless to say they still didn't acknowledge the fault and more often than not were very rude over the phone.. telling me they had fixed the problem, when infact had made everything worse, people claimnig to be managers when they were not, engineer visits never being met, callbacks never being received.

    I've had to deal with Virgins customer support once so far and it was absolutely spot on, instantly dealt with, engineer visit was swift and all problems resolved in a speedly manner.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    From my own experience was Virgin had better broadband performance but poorer customer service but Sky broadband had lower performance but had easier to contact customer service. However,I must agree the quality of the Sky technical service was not brilliant. We used to get around 3.5MB to 3.9MB on our line and now get only around 2.4MB to 3.0MB!! They still cannot solve this issue although they could be trying a sneaky one. OTH,the ping and upload speeds are not bad and the speed is consistent throughout the day so I can put up with it. This is with their ADSL packages.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    I used to recommend Virgin Media all the time until they started throttling their down/up speeds. Virgin Media's 'unlimited' comes with strings attached!

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    It looks like I'm the only person with anything good to say about Sky, possibly because I've had no problems with my broadband service (touch wood).

    I get the full 20Mb speed (my router is set to 19999 down, 1000 up), but then I live <200m from the exchange. I chose Sky because they offered an actual unlimited service (ie no FUP), and most months I hit 1Tb+ (down & up) without worrying about "extra" charges or warnings. In six months, there has been one drop-out. IMHO a great deal for £15/month - for Sky TV/phone users it only costs £7.50 - so I'll probably move over to them when my BT contract ends.

    I can't comment on Virgin as I've never used them, but I've found Sky to be very reasonable to deal with on the phone. I've had no problems with Sky so I don't know about their customer/technical service, but I'll never go back to BT Broadband (I had business & home), although that's another story...

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    VM have been throttling for years, but I find it's one of the better policies, you lose some speed for a few hours and that's it. And there are no caps off-peak. It is unlimited, you can download as much as you want (within reason) but they just try to get people to do it when the network isn't as busy.
    It's not like they're the only one, very few companies don't have some sort of FUP/AUP and Sky is no exception, from what I've heard if you hammer P2P downloads you'll get a warning then get booted off the network, but that's fair IMO.
    In terms of throttling, lots of ADSL providers don't, after all it's not really fair to throttle when most of your customers will be getting far less than the advertised speed to start with. And it wouldn't be easy to implement on such a network with the customers all having different sync speeds - would you use fixed speed caps or cap by a percentage or something else?

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Quote Originally Posted by watercooled View Post
    VM have been throttling for years, but I find it's one of the better policies, you lose some speed for a few hours and that's it. And there are no caps off-peak. It is unlimited, you can download as much as you want (within reason) but they just try to get people to do it when the network isn't as busy.
    It's not like they're the only one, very few companies don't have some sort of FUP/AUP and Sky is no exception, from what I've heard if you hammer P2P downloads you'll get a warning then get booted off the network, but that's fair IMO.
    It will depend on how a company defines a FUP, for example Be does not throttle or traffic manage, but they have a FUP, and it mostly refers to illegal uses of the connection like spamming or DoS.

    In terms of throttling, lots of ADSL providers don't, after all it's not really fair to throttle when most of your customers will be getting far less than the advertised speed to start with. And it wouldn't be easy to implement on such a network with the customers all having different sync speeds - would you use fixed speed caps or cap by a percentage or something else?
    Its "upto" for a reason due to the way ADSL technology works, sure its convenient as it is, but there isn't any realistic way of getting round this (except phasing out ADSL or everybody connects to the street cabinets).

    Still think its better than saying "20Mbps FIBRE!*" and that asterisk stands for "but only if you don't use it too much at one go"

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    I didn't mean it like that, I was just saying because of the varying sync speeds with DSL customers it's not as simple to throttle as it is for Virgin where everyone gets round about the same speed.
    For example, if you're on a 20Mbps package which throttles to 5Mbps after 1GB, if you only sync at 2Mbps it's not going to make any difference. But if you throttle by 75% then people close to the exchange will still be happily downloading at 5Mbps but someone with 2Mbps will end up with 512kbps.
    I think VM are closer to the truth with their advertised speeds, at least you actually get them. But advertising anything as 'Fibre' is pointless really, everything ends up fibre eventually and VM's network is a HFC network so it's not Fibre to your house like they imply. Not that it matters, but that's what they have people thinking.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    Quote Originally Posted by watercooled View Post
    It's not like they're the only one, very few companies don't have some sort of FUP/AUP and Sky is no exception, from what I've heard if you hammer P2P downloads you'll get a warning then get booted off the network, but that's fair IMO.
    Sky's top package does not have an FUP.

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    Re: Internet Providers - Virgin Media or SKY?

    All their packages have what the call an acceptable use policy according to their T+Cs last time I read them (and I know of someone who's felt the consequences). They normally don't do anything in the way of throttling but if you use an excessively large amount of P2P bandwidth or something, they send you a warning letter and should you continue, cut you off. Well, they say it was because of P2P but for all I know the might have been spamming or something. It just shows they have something in place to monitor traffic and such.

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