Alternating between Sky and Virgin

After Virgins recent price hike, I dropped the phone and TV from my package and just kept the Broadband. Virgin were only interested in getting the set top boxes back so I'm left with the Virgin cabling intact. That's doesn't bother me as it's not really visible.

It did get me thinking though, if once the Broadband contract is complete, I get Sky in and have all their stuff installed. Is it then feasible to flip-flop between the pair of them every 12/18 months (whenever your deal is up) as a new customer ? Has anyone on here tried it ?

I must add though that I sometime work from home and also do on-call overnight support so threatening to leave is not really an option as I do need to have something in place in case they call my bluff.

Because they use totally different systems, switching between back and forth would be relatively easy, although not really worth it imho....

You could even run them together at the same time, so you have redundancy...

If you're with one, i'd just stick to it.... and you wont get speeds anywhere near Virgin with Sky...

http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6790135477.png

If you are happy with normal fibre speeds though you could flip-flop if you so choose.

40-70Mbps is still fast enough for most people, unless you shift large amounts of data.

We got a free telly last time we contracted with Sky, and saved a few quid on the monthlies

It's very straightforward and well worth it financially, especially if you use sites like quidco as you can get large cashback amounts for signing up as a new user each time, which effectively brings the price of the service down to around £7 per month in total (for us at least).

Works out even better if they raise their prices mid contract as you can leave without penalty, even if you're only a few months into the contract yet you still keep your cashback and whatever other incentives they gave you.

If you're happy with the speeds you currently receive then ignore the higher packages from Virgin, if you can get them (some areas in south yorkshire are oversubscribed) then unless your using a wired ethernet connection or higher end wireless equipment the difference will be almost un-noticeable unless you download very very large files regularly or have a large amount of people in the house all using bandwidth hungry applications all the time.

Still got 11 months on my Virgin broadband contract (or until they put it up again !) so plenty of time to think about it. Thanks for the replies, good to hear other peoples thoughts on it

You can chop and change between the two, the ease of which can sometimes depend on what engineering work is primarily carried out (may relate to others rather than yourself Mr Owl).

Sometimes a new virgin customer will want all their existing telephone sockets rewiring into the virgin telephone service, requiring an alteration in the way the extensions are fed. If you then go back to a non virgin service those extension sockets would require wiring back again. It depends on the engineer on the day, sometimes a BT engineer wont mind, sometimes they'll stick by the book and say the extension sockets are not covered by their service, which they aren't.