Dave Thorp's Blog

Slightly earlier than planned but we are now totally disconnected from virgin media with our phone service now on BT, Sky got installed yesterday and O2 broadband activated itself in record time by activating just over 1 working day after we ordered it.

So how are we finding the changes. I’ll avoid talking about BT as a phone line is a phone line in respects of making calls so I’ll just talk about the TV and broadband.

TV

The main difference is probably the reduction in tuners in the sky plus box compared to the v+. There is the lack of HD as well but since we don’t have a HDTV and virgin media only have one HD channel that really isn’t a great loss.

The sky plus seems to function fine with the additional benefit being I can now set programmes to record whilst I am out from my iPhone. We also now have full teletext services which is nice (Yvonne wants to look at holidays).

Probably the only bad thing is the installers left some wires trailing that we need to tuck under the carpet at some point. Oh that and the sky plus doesn’t confirm when you press to delete a recording, it just deletes it. There was also an annoying rotating light on the front of the sky plus box when watching a sky plus recording but I managed to turn that off!

Broadband

Now this is probably where I would notice the difference as we have moved from a 20Mbit service to an up to 8Mbit service. Our broadband synced at 5.5Mbit last night but since then has increased to 6.1Mbit.

Oddly we have not notice too much of a speed difference. Probably the main reason for this is virgin media traffic manage their 20Mbit service and reduce it to 5Mbit if you dare actually try and use the 20Mbit service. So in actual fact taking this traffic management into account our service is now faster!

I was also concerned from the number of O2 broadband users experiencing slowdowns at peak rate. I am pleased to say however that so far we haven’t experienced this.

Conclusion

We’ve actually made a huge change by switching from having phone, broadband and TV with one supplier through cable to having them provided by 3 different suppliers through satellite and a BT phone line. So far so good though and this is saving us £15 a month on our previous prices. We also now get three small manageable bills rather than one chunky one.

Of course this saving could be negated as Sky gave us free sports and movies for one month to try and Yvonne is quite liking having the movies so we could end up keeping them. Oh well easy come easy go

Well least they will be on 17th May 2007. After a lot of thought finally decided to get a V+ box.

Been considering it because virgin refunded the £100 deposit we had to pay when we signed up but did it as a bill credit so we get just over 2 free months now. Been after either a DVD recorder or a PVR so this kind of makes sense (plus we keep missing programmes and when we do miss them they don’t show up on catch up TV on demand)

Means we now pay £45.20 a month and get

Phone size L (free evenings and weekends to landlines) with caller display
Broadband size L (4Mb…. though if they’re upping the speed of size XL to 20Mb hopefully size L will get upped eventually)
TV Size XL with V+ Box

Got a free install on the V+ as well (when it’s meant to be £75 for existing customers who don’t take a second box) so pretty happy there too!

All’s good for me with Virgin Media.

When I signed up I was on 3 for £30 which gave me

Basic TV
2 Mb Broadband
Free Weekend Calls

When virgin took over this was upped to

TV Size L
Broadband Size M (2Mb)
Phone Size M (Free Weekends)

Following the loss of the sky channels they upped it to 3 for £35 giving me

TV Size XL
Broadband Size L (supposed to be 4Mb but clocks at 10Mb most the time)
Phone Size L (Free evenings and weekends)

And now thanks to all the phone changes it should now be 3 for £33.45

Happy days