The Best Deal - Sky Or Virgin?
April 25, 2007
So the two media giants of the UK continue their battle for TV, internet, landline and now mobile phone business.
The latest offer from Virgin is 4 for £40. They also offer 3 for £30 which is all of the above services minus the mobile phone deal which allows you to keep your own number and gives you 300 texts and 300 minutes a month to use on any network, any time.
Sky on the other hand offer See, Speak, Surf for £26 plus you need a BT phone line at £11 a month. So that totals £37.
When you compare the 3 for £30 and See, Speak, Surf the differences become obvious rather quickly and show the Sky deal to be a lot beeter value than the Virgin offer.
Here is the Virgin offer
Now try the Sky offer
Now I have Sky TV, full package with sport & movies - £43.50 a month.
I use a BT landline phone - £25 a month (line rental & calls)
Plus I use BT Broadband - £27.99 a month (Option 4 - no longer offered - Upto 8mb - 40Gb download limit)
So my total is £96.49. Now lets see how much the same will cost with Virgin & Sky.
Virgin don’t offer an easy calculator so it’s broken down as follows.
TV - £37; Phone - £25; Broadband - £35; Total - £97.
An increase of £0.51
Sky will charge me £58.50 plus my £11 BT line rental.
A saving of £26.99
Now there are still some differences in the two packages. The Sky landline calls offer allows you to call 10 international destinations free including the USA, Canada and Australia.
On the other hand the Sky broadband offer is upto 16Mb depending on distance from the local telephone exchange whereas the Virgin offer is for upto 10mb. Both the broadband speeds are guesstimates in my opinion. Internet speeds will always fluctuate.
So the winner by far in this choice of services is Sky.
A few added notes:
The Virgin website is not a clean and easy layout. To work out the cost of a total package can be complicated unlike the Sky site where it is a matter of visiting one page and making your selections.
I have not changed my broadband option as I will be forced to sign a further 1 year contract to regrade. The current Option 3 has a no download limit.
I am going to join Sky Talk.
I have considered joining SkyBroadband and have a few friends who use it without trouble. My reasons for not joining are mainly for work reasons, possible disruption of service, loss of 7 year old email address, no wish to change equipment I use (router etc) - if it was for personal use I’d already have it.
