Until very recently had my phone, tv and broadband through NTL (now virgin media); I was reasonably happy. The broadband service was pretty good, I never had any real problems, the telephone worked and we switched our TV service from Sky to NTL to take advantage of a cheaper charging structure.
Then last November I got fed up with waiting for NTL to bring out their PVR and switched back to Sky to get Sky+. I have to say I’ve been really pleased with the Sky+ it’s really easy to use and having it means that we never miss any of our favorite programs.
I had been getting 10mb broadband from NTL for £17.50 a month by phoning every few months and threatening to cancel - but recently Virgin haven’t been offering such good deals, the best I managed to get last time I rang was 4mb for £20 odd.
I don’t need 10mb broadband I use wireless all the time so never get anything better than about 5mb anyway, so when I realised I could get Sky’s up to 6mb service for £5 a month it seemed sensible to givr it a whirl. This meant moving my phone line back to BT which I duly did. The sky router arrived on the day the ADSL was due to be activated and the installation went without a hitch. I didn’t expect it to be that easy.
There are other advantages to moving back to a BT / Sky combo for my telecoms & entertainment the BT, here are a few that spring to mind:
- The BT phone line supports caller ID - this is something I’ve really missed since with NTL, I can’t understand why they don’t offer it
- Sky have withdrawn some of their channels from Virgin, this includes Sky One which would have been bad news because a lot of or favorite shows are on Sky One
- Sky talk - Sky offer a call package. You pay BT for your line rental and Sky for your calls. The free package fives you free off peak UK land line calls - but for an extra £5 a month you get anytime calls and you also get international calls to 10 different countries. This includes the US, and since my Sister lives in New York this is a bonus.
- Overall I think the move to sky is going to save me in the region of £40 per month
- Now I’ve added the sky movies package I have acees to sky anytime on mobile (which I plan to do another post on later)
On the downside BT wanted to charge £5 a quarter for 1571 (their answering service) but this gave me an excuse to go out and get new telephone handsets with a built in answer machine and caller display so it’s not all bad.
I realise I’m probably in a bit of a honeymoon period with the Sky service at the moment, but for the time being I’m happy, and if the Sky broadband goes down in the next few weeks, I’ve still got virgin to fall back on.
