Sky are rippng me off?

I have the 200 meg service on Virgin. I have no idea what our download is a month but it has to be circa 2-300 gig with no penalty. (two boys watch youtube a lot, amazon prime, etc etc

Have been with them a long time so that and some tive package and phone is 50 quid a month.

Klyde posted:

Sky bill  for (TV/phone/internet 2mb) is like a small mortgage.  

Somebody's got to pay Chris Froome's and Geraint Thomas' wages

TalkTalk does (have unlimited broadband, not pay CF & GT's wages)

Been with EE for over two years found them excellent did have a slight problem a few months ago the broadband went down back it was a problem at the exchange, it was fixed in under 4 hours, 6 months free broadband given as goodwill.

I was with BT before switching to EE but the after sales service was crap mind you that was if they ever answered the phone !!

Virgin broadband has been excellent for me for many, many years now. I've got the 200mb package too (speeds often exceed this!) and afaik Virgin doesn't impose any download limits on their BB packages.  However having switched TV from SKY to them a few, months back, I'm less enamoured with the TV package. The TV user experience and Tivo seem prehistoric in comparison to SKY.

My Bt package is unlimited and AFAIK BT don't use traffic managemnt to throttle you down if you use a lot of bandwidth. 

I agree the service can be crap but if you persist you can get somewhere (helps to be retired and have unlimited time!) - there are some good people, it's just a struggle to get referred to them.

The other thing is that BT are very amenable to haggling at renewal time - I'm getting unlimited landline, voicemail, copper broadband (circa 7mps), and BT Sport for about £18 per month.

I have BT Infinity-2 (75Mbs).    BB is unlimited & incl's evening weekend calls,  and with the extra's like unlimited phone & the other call services,  I pay about £36 a month.   I don't want  BT TV as nothing appeals thats extra to Freeview.  The problem is the Sky TV package is very hard to beat for content, but boy do they know how to charge for it.    My son had a rethink, realised they were paying for stuff they rarely or never used & reduced it to the basic.   So do you really need all the services you pay for ?? 

The answer is switch providers every 12 months. It seems to me the industry relies on apathy as its new customers that get all the deals at the expense of existing ones......

you could always try your luck and threaten cancellation with sky who will then put you through to their cancellation team who appear to have special powers to give you more value..... Crap way of running a business but that's their current thinking. 

Gary

Finished with Sky last month, and got a Freesat box. Stopped the BT landline as well as we have mobiles with Tesco for around a tenner per month each. Broadband is with Virginmedia - thirty-four quid a month for a 70Mb line

Definitely worth arguing.  I told VM that my landline plus 100 Mb broadband was too expensive at £48 a month and  now I have a landline plus 200 Mb broadband for about £36 a month.

i do pay separately for Sky TV though.  The user interface on the Sky box is unbeatable.

best

David

David Hendon posted:

 The user interface on the Sky box is unbeatable.

best

David

This. I've tried a couple of times to move away from Sky TV, but that interface is a work of genius & SWMBO really didn't enjoy struggling with the alternatives. Each time I left, Sky then offered me a better deal to return. 

and that interface started life in the late 90s and has stayed roughly similar  ever since and I seem to remember it was inspired in part by OpenTV who created the middleware. I had an old Pace first generation STB that I had used for testing back in the late 90s  that I powered up a few  years back - i powered it up with an unpaired valid card - and it was effectively in a basic service type mode  - but boy was it slow - it just shows how you start to take things for granted when you get used to them in terms of responsiveness.

Prices in the US seem MUCH higher.  I just yesterday renegotiated our TV/Internet/Phone contract (fibre from Verizon FiOS).  The best I could do for TV (it's 300 or so channels...100 of them in HD), internet (75/75) and phone (because they REALLY want you to have the home phone service and charge more without it) was $195.00 / month.

But that is only about £3.25 after the idiot referendum vote!

Nick from Suffolk posted:

But that is only about £3.25 after the idiot referendum vote!

My ISP does not give me the option of paying in £££££'s

I have neither land line nor TV package, but still have pretty much everything a big package delivers. So fibre broadband (Virgin basic at 50Mb for about £28/month, going up for free to about 70Mb at some point in the next year) and no land line rental. And a mobile contract for less than land line rental.

Even with Netflix and Now TV subscriptions (the latter is Sky's version of Netflix) alongside HD freeview, free iPlayer, 4od etc, it's miles cheaper than a more traditional TV/phone/broadband setup. And it makes normal Sky etc seem a bit archaic.

Maybe not available to all, in rural areas especially, but if available, it's definitely a route worth considering.

Dave***t posted:

I have neither land line nor TV package, but still have pretty much everything a big package delivers. So fibre broadband (Virgin basic at 50Mb for about £28/month, going up for free to about 70Mb at some point in the next year) and no land line rental. And a mobile contract for less than land line rental.

Even with Netflix and Now TV subscriptions (the latter is Sky's version of Netflix) alongside HD freeview, free iPlayer, 4od etc, it's miles cheaper than a more traditional TV/phone/broadband setup. And it makes normal Sky etc seem a bit archaic.

Maybe not available to all, in rural areas especially, but if available, it's definitely a route worth considering.

Hmm - going to need to have a look at this. Our Virgin package keeps going up and i'd like to ditch the landline (unused) and TiVo (brilliant but we only watch a few channels) and move to streaming / freeview. 

James

I don't use any wired or fibre connection, so don't pay line rental - we use a broadband phone.  Sky HD for TV (no movies or sports) costs us £16 a month. I also subscribe to Netflix & we get Amazon stuff courtesy of Prime. More than enough programming available!

Could anyone with experience of both Sky and Virgin TiVo tv boxes explain why they think the Sky one is much better?

I have experience of both . . . the Virgin Tivo box is good, but Sky+ is just miles better. All the same functions basically, just much easier to use. Sky do have this nailed for TV. Plus Game of Thrones, obviously.

For broadband though, I use Virgin fibre, and it's the fastest and most reliable I've used. I recommend it if you have it in your (UK) area. I buy 50Mb and actually get 50Mb pretty consistently. 

Simon - Sky used OpenTV middleware for its early STBs but replaced it more recently with NDS (now Cisco) Linux-based software.

I don't have any experience of sky, but I recognise 10 year old technology and virgins tivo is it.

Solid, Gary, I'm not particularly trying to defend Virgin - but neither of you are really describing what it is that you can do better or easier on a Sky box. Incidentally, I've got Virgin's 70Mb broadband, which is pretty reliable. I can't justify paying for faster service.

Virgin has been good for us - in the 10 years we've had the Virgin service, the only problem came around the time of the fibre upgrade rollout which stretched the capability of one of the network cabinets serving our area. Virgin upgraded it within a few weeks and all has been fine since. Main issue is the creeping price. We did renegotiate this last year but the price slowly creeps up again. We're not using a lot of the functionality so are now looking to ditch the package and go for the fibre only so the discussion above has been very useful. 

James