News - Virgin Media increasing call and broadband charges in April

[HEXUS]

Customers face a price hike across a range of Virgin Media services.

Read more.

[crossy]

The mobile, television and broadband provider had previously said that it would be doubling the speed of its broadband services free of charge later this year, but has now confirmed that monthly bills for the service will rise.

In other words ... they're a bunch of lying ba**ards!

Virgin Media will increase the price of its Large Broadband package by an average of £25 a year and plans to bump up some call charges by 12 percent. Buying Large Broadband without line rental will increase from £21 a month to £22.50.

So if you take the package (data+calls) then you get hit with a £2.08/month increase, but if you've only got the data line then it's only £1.50/month. Presumably the extra 58p is an increase in the line rental - or are folks with just a Virgin phone line going to get off scot-free?

"We will be proactively contacting existing customers in the coming weeks to make sure that they are on the best value package for them."

Yep, had one of those calls - apparently to get best value meant spending more money per month - they were insistent that I needed a "free calls" package because the bill went up over Christmas (because we were phoning relatives to pass on season's greetings). Then it was "we'll gladly sell you a mobile phone contract instead" Didn't see any potential for savings, more like those bank phone calls where they want to "check something about your account" and end up as a 15 minute sales call.

Customers subscribing to the XL TV TiVo pack will face an increase from £3 to £5 a month, while call connection fees will rise from 13.24p to 14.94p.

Was planning to "treat" us to a Tivo shortly, but with that whopping price rise they can go whistle. Heck, with this news I'd be seriously thinking about "downsizing" my current package.

Am I just being cynical or do VM always slip their price rises in at around this time - February/March? I'm a cross crossy!

[malculator]

Hmm, was thinking about upgrading my broadband to the XL package. Need more info.

[Jay]

lol

Well guys, Virgin media are offering everyone a free car as well.




















but you have to pay for it

[SUMMONER]

Brilliant and I thought bills were going to come down slightly for my 100Mbit broadband.

[[GSV]Trig]

Yeah my bill went down last month, guessing it'll be going back up again shortly then, well once they roll out the speed increase I'll drop down a bracket and drop my phone line..

[watercooled]

Simple solution if you're happy with broadband speed - move down a package or two when you get the upgrades. If enough people did it it might make them regret doing it. Unfortunately I doubt it would happen though.

[Hicks12]

im already on the lowest package .

Flipping VM, im normally happy with them (bar their customer support... everything else excellent), but this is a pee taker... Oh yeah guys its all free cause we are great arent we? Oh sorry your going to have to pay extra on your bill first though.

I wont get the upgrade till june next year... so they expect an EXTRA YEAR of increased prices? thats taking the pee pee there!

Why are they even allowed to do this? advertise free and add a cost.

[Andi-C]

I'm leaving VM, the night caps are just a disgrace ! I had 50mb package & evenings it jumped down to 25mb, now thats enough for what I need but its not what I pay for ? I get the speeds when every one is at work but so am I ! The Virgin box is also **** & missing recording, starting them late & ending early, crashing & slow interface.

As for the monthly invoice, is just confusing & I hate the extra money for "activations" if you want to up your services.

My early days of Virgin were very good & I had a great ping but since they have been up'ing the internet speeds it been rubbish...

I ended up dropping my internet service down & will see out my service until I move house...

I will be getting BE internet & sky, looking forward to saying good bye to the monkey on my shoulder that is Virgin & their service !


Rant over...

[Andeh13]

Come on Sky firbe optic....I am itching for an alternative to Virgin media and their total lack of customer service!

[GoNz0]

well i phoned up, i have 2 box's with TV XL, ones got V+HD, the others a V+HD but standard package as a 2nd box, XL internet and M phone, I went to retentions and said I have come to you as I have a loyalty discount and cant follow the normal sales channel, She has upgraded one box to TiVo for £3pm, scrapped the 2nd box charge as its part of the TiVo deal and pointed out the price rise will leave me only 50p up but a savings a saving for an upgrade, she then noticed the 2nd box was not V+HD so it was also activated for free even though the tickles for HD only.

not bad for a phone call to check!

TiVo has no activation or installation fee either.

[crossy]

Simple solution if you're happy with broadband speed - move down a package or two when you get the upgrades. If enough people did it it might make them regret doing it. Unfortunately I doubt it would happen though.

That's exactly what I'm seriously thinking about doing - after all I'm on XL now, so dropping down to L, or even M only means going from 30Mb (XL preupgrade) to 20Mb (M/L postupgrade) and if they hack me off then maybe I'll ditch a couple of TV channels too.

Alas any BT-based service (Be, Sky, etc) isn't really an option because according to BT the best speed I can get is 5Mb, and the estimated is actually 3Mb. Which, if my understanding is correct, ain't a country mile what I could get from mobile broadband (3.6Mb->7.2Mb afaik).

Of course, I could always tell VM to take the phone and TV channels away and get Sky to do a 1:1 replacement, holding onto VM's cable broadband (which actually is quite good). From what I understand if skip to Sky then I'm not going to be missing out on much - although Sky don't seem to have a good reputation for either efficiency nor customer service - but in return I can stream some of the Sky channels to my XBox.

I'm leaving VM, the night caps are just a disgrace ! I had 50mb package & evenings it jumped down to 25mb, now thats enough for what I need but its not what I pay for ? I get the speeds when every one is at work but so am I ! The Virgin box is also **** & missing recording, starting them late & ending early, crashing & slow interface.

I'm on the 30Mb package and I've not seen any drop in response, other than that you'd expect with the US coming online. Certainly speed tests seem to be prettty consistent.
TV on the other hand, I'll totally agree with - we replaced the old box with a V+HD a long time ago and while the "new" box is a quantum leap over the old one reliability-wise, it still decides to reboot at a strange time every week. Oh, and it's laughably easy to fault the box by using the "OnDemand" services.

As for the monthly invoice, is just confusing & I hate the extra money for "activations" if you want to up your services.

True - e.g. "free Tivo box" and then find out that if you want the 1TB one rather than 500MB, then it's an extra £50 for the box, and an extra £50 for installation - surely the 1TB is installed in exactly the same way as the lesser one.

While dissing VM, are Sky any different? From what I understand they're also pretty good at slipping in those "small print" charges. E.g. I'm sure there were a couple of nice "gotchas" if you wanted HD services. And it was fascinating to read the thread on Sky's support forum about issues with Anytime+ where the company made a press announcement and a couple of days later the (rude and stupid apparently) call centre staff were still giving out the old information.

[GoNz0]

crossy, work out a sky package, tell em you have been given a deal for £xx and your giving it serious thought but decided to phone to see what they can do for you 1st.

dropping to 20mb will still put you to 60mb but less gb/day before a speed cap.

[crossy]

well i phoned up, i have 2 box's with TV XL, ones got V+HD, the others a V+HD but standard package as a 2nd box, XL internet and M phone, I went to retentions and said I have come to you as I have a loyalty discount and cant follow the normal sales channel, She has upgraded one box to TiVo for £3pm, scrapped the 2nd box charge as its part of the TiVo deal and pointed out the price rise will leave me only 50p up but a savings a saving for an upgrade, she then noticed the 2nd box was not V+HD so it was also activated for free even though the tickles for HD only.

Call me stupid if you want, but haven't they just screwed you out of an extra £5/month for the Tivo service? (yes, I know you said "£3pm", but of course that's going up).

That said, if they wanted to offer me a capped (@£3/month) Tivo upgrade for a year with a £50 box charge for the 1TB Tivo box then I'd probably accept it.

[GoNz0]

Tivo= £3

2nd box charge removed as per the tivo deal -£6.50 pm

£3.50 up at the mo, £1.50 up after tivo price rise

expected other price rise is about another £1

i only rang up to enquire about tivo free for new cusotomers but they got me into another contract so they win and im happy.

[FRISH]

Brilliant and I thought bills were going to come down slightly for my 100Mbit broadband.

I think it still will for current 100M users. Since 50 megs will change to 100, and then 120 megs.