So, life’s a bit different now to how it was a few months ago. I’m earning less and working from home, so it’s time to review a few things. And one change worthy of mention is my broadband supplier.
A long, long time ago I had a dial-up connection using NTL. Leaving NTL was one of the biggest administration faffs of my life and I actually ended up losing several month’s line rental to them. I was pretty upset and vowed never to use their services again. When Virgin Media took NTL over my resentment was passed on to the new owner.
This resentment has not been helped by Virgin’s frequent and incessant posting of marketing through our letterbox.
When we moved to Swindon our first, rented house had no aerial so our options for TV were Sky or Virgin, and with past experiences in mind, we signed up to Sky. Impressed with the service (especially Sky+, which has transformed our TV viewing), we’ve taken our Sky to the new house we’ve bought and gradually taken on more Sky services including phone calls and line rental.
But working from home and being a web developer means I’m using my internet connection a lot more and doing not only lots of uploads, but some fairly hefty downloads too.
And the only way to get quicker broadband round here is to go for Virgin and use the fibre that’s in our road.
So I’ve been asking questions and considering the Virgin option and, with a slight reluctance, have now taken the plunge. I’m ditching Sky and going fibre-optic.
I have to say that this is almost purely a decision based on internet speed. I’m expecting service to be roughly equivalent and cost-wise an equivalent Virgin package is about £5 per month more expensive than Sky. Well, it’s not quite equivalent; it includes HD – we can’t use HD as we have an old-skool SD, CRT TV, but where Sky do a cheaper SD option, VM don’t.
We also benefit greatly from some Quidco.com cashback (£150’s worth!) and £100 credit on our account – a pretty nice little bonus.
Sky didn’t put up much of a fight when I cancelled. No one seems to want to haggle these days! I was expecting to be offered a cheaper package, but they didn’t offer me anything!
So it’s being installed next Tuesday. I’ll let you know how we get on!