Quote:
| Originally Posted by GLOC x5332 A3 G012 Pod C  . I am in all day tomorrow and most of friday so come by and I will buy you a coffee.
I will check with the agents tomorrow about Cable with Virgin although I am a little suspect following the comments on here. Their wine club is excellent though! |
in Fleet you are about 5 minutes away from the Virgin Media head office, so if anything goes wrong you can always take it up with them there. Or should I say "us" there. As part of the VM organisation, my following comments may be a little biased:
Cable broadband is capable of much higher speed than ADSL, Virgin Media have announced nationwide 50mb broadband by the end of the year. ADSL can't reach that kind of speed yet, and even when it does it will only be available to people who's address is "The Exchange"
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ADSL is severely hampered by the distance from the exchange, and contention. Cable broadband doesn't have "exchanges" in the same way - the distance is measured in feet from your local roadside cabinet where the optical fibre terminates. Contention is also usually lower for cable broadband, simply because each cabinet serves less customers. In dense areas, this second fact is less true, but I don't think Fleet is particularly densely built up.
In regards to TV service, as I was personally involved in one area I feel I have to shout about it a bit. Cable offers a service which is currently unmatched by any other provider - Video On Demand. Satellite simply cannot provide this service (they claim to, but it's actually using a technology called push VoD which is severely limited compared to True VoD). IPTV will offer it, as yet the content coverage is quite limited though, and there are issues with streamed content that don't affect true VoD (which isn't streamed on your internet connection, it's actually called a "narrowcast", as opposed to broadcast). Virgin (well, Telewest) was actually the first to put a HD broadcast service into the market, but Sky pretty much own that market now - they have several linear HD channels, whereas Virgin Media only has 1, and quite a lot of HD On Demand content.
Costs, there are several deals on at the moment from things like 2 for £20 - that's phone and broadband for £20 a month. Which I think comes with free TV, you'd have to check to be certain; up to the VIP pack, which has 20Mb broadband, phone with talk unlimited, V+ (PVR inc HD) plus second set top box for another room, plus sports & movies for £85 a month.
Other issues raised here have been about billing. Which was abysmal. 5 different billing systems were in use across the company, thanks to the merger of ex Telewest and ex NTL (despite being called Virgin, it's still the same old company, who paid squillions to buy the Virgin name). The last migration to the single billing platform is happening early next month, so it is now a lot better than it was. There are lots of initiatives under way to make it better, but some people are still having problems. I can say that the number of billing calls has dropped dramatically in the last 6 months (more than halved) but you still hear bad tales.
But as I said, I am probably not giving wholly unbiased information here.
Andy