Soooo.
I am on Virgin cable, 300mb and land line. £59 month. Service been stable and fast for the last 10 years or so.
Community fibre wired the road last year, can get 1gb FTTP, no phone (will drop the landline) £27 month year 1, £29 month year 2. No set up fees.
Soooo
I get in touch with Virgin on the chatbot about cancelling. Ian on chatbot confirms I am out of contract and on a 30 day no charge cancelation and offers me a new 300mb deal for 36 quid month for three year contract. Ok says I send me details.
£36 quid month actually means:
£36 till march 25, £39 from March 25, £43 from march 26, and - wait for it - £75 a month from July 26. talk about lure you in and then stiff you. It would be cheaper to stay out of contract, that only goes up £6 per annum.
Even cheaper to move to community fibre.
I then get a phone call from "Ian". Ian happens to be in Mumbai, probably called Pradesh
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Is community fibre part of the government funded 'flood cabling' with fibre similar to that done here by Gigaclear?
They did the actual work together with Openreach but seems in practice than any ISP can use the infrastructure.
Stayed with Plusnet as their offer was as good as anybody elses.
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>> Is community fibre part of the government funded 'flood cabling' with fibre similar to that
>> done here by Gigaclear?
No, they installed and own the Fibre network, albeit using openreach poles and holes (under the terms of the gov open access rules) Community fibre is a privately funded operation.
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I've been on cable here since it was put in maybe late 90s - Telecential then NTL now Virgin.
We've had major disruptions around town for well over a year from City Fibre, also installed in our road. There are now a number of providers I can go through, sane sort of prices as Z says. Prices look appealing (we're currently paying around £50 for Virgin) but no TV services and most importantly no TiVo box.
So my target when my renewal comes up in June will be to start at somewhere around £40 for 2 years. Last time I signed up as a new customer and the day before the new "installation" got a call from a third retentions department offering a suitable deal. As Z says, annual prices rises are to be expected with Virgin.
EDIT we also have the landline in that cost but hardly ever used.
Last edited by: smokie on Tue 28 Jan 25 at 18:34
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I'd been on Sky 70Mb FTTC at £32pm for a few years until I saw their 'new customers only' offers last year. A Trumpish discussion with them resulted in 500Mb FTTP with VoIP for £36pm on a 24 month contract.
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Re fibreto premises, does the router still need to be plugged into the mains or is it like the old land line connection where it was powered from the exchange?
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>> Re fibreto premises, does the router still need to be plugged into the mains or
>> is it like the old land line connection where it was powered from the exchange?
>>
You get an extra device that needs plugging in - an Optical Network Terminal plus the router.
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FTTP from Trooli here at 900mbs for £29.99 on a two year deal.
I posted here a while back that I didn't think it would happen but it did!
Every Tom, Dick and Harriette company has been digging up the pavements around here installing fibre-optic cable, except for our road (and I guess other similar) unadopted roads.
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BB contract & TV was up Mid February.
Was £102, the new contract was to be £162 and was told I need not do anything as all services would be the same. £162 became £122 after 10 min chat. The chat continued and became £115 IIRC- cannot be cheaper
Not pleased so asked for disconnections - BB Speed boost and price fell to £96. They offered even lower if I sent back the SkyQ box and used their TV puck.
No storage on the puck and you would have to watch adverts etc -
Reasonably happy. The odd 4/5 hiccups with the new FTTP BB connection in May (now £27 IIRC was £32) in the last 8 months but back working in minutes - once 30 min outage - Sky not the Openreach BB.
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>>SKY Q
I find the Sky Q box often loses connection to the BB router, requiring a reset.
We had a Talk Talk router - this happened.
We had a Sky router - this didn't happen.
We have a Trooli router this happened.
No other devices have this problem.
The tin foil hat wearer in me suggests that it is deliberate.
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>> The tin foil hat wearer in me suggests that it is deliberate.
The techie hat wearer in me suggests its a router configuration issue.
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I have a sneaking suspicion, but haven't been interested enough to investigate, that there is some sort of handshake between a Sky Q box and the router or Sky mother ship when it tries to bring up networking. If the box is configured for dhcp it certainly takes more time than I would expect to show it's IP address and gateway etc.
Have you tried using fixed IP addresses on box and router?
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Going back many years I recall (a friend) messing with cracking the Sky box to avoid paying subs and that involved preventing it calling home. It had to be allowed to do so sometimes, but strictly under your control not theirs.
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>Going back many years..
Dialup connection?
My Q box wakes up at 05:15 every morning, appears to read the disk for about 10 to 15 seconds and then goes back to sleep. I'm guessing that it's reporting back viewing data and maybe doing a bit of housekeeping.
I might wireshark it to see who it's talking to and what it's saying. Even if it's encrypted the key is probably just an XOR/bitshift of the viewing card number.
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Sooooooooo
I did the old trick of going onto the BB supplier web site, got so far along signing up, then retreated, did that about 4 times.
On attempt no 5 a special offer popped up, sign up now and get first three months free.
So I did. Two years 1gb FTP.
Engineers arriving 5th February. I'll cancel Virgin once fibre is in and stable.
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>> Going back many years I recall (a friend) messing with cracking the Sky box
Last time I hacked a sky box was in the mid 80's, a crack called Voyager. It meant a home made interface pcb into card slot, a self wired serial interface cable, and running "Voyager' in a dos box on a windows 3.1 laptop
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Broadband. - Bromptonaut
