Sky/virgin/BT

[momlife3]

Hey.
We're thinking of making a switch from sky!
We pay around £150 a month for sky tv. Everything except sports. Tv and broadband and 2x multi room.
Internet signal is sh*t

Anyone use Virgin or BT? Would you recommend?

Trying to reduce our monthly outgoings.

Every month I feel robbed paying a lot of money for tv and crap Wi-Fi

Broadband for £25 or less.
Freeview & free streaming apps (iplayer, ITV, etc) and Netflix or Amazon Prime or similar if you want extra.

We have just reduced our £97 sky bill down to £47. This includes an upgrade on our broadband too. We rang to cancel sky completely but they offered us a good deal. No sports or films just their entertainment package and fibre optic broadband which we didn’t previously have. Maybe give that a try. Good luck!

We moved to Virgin in 2020 due to low speed and frequent outages with BT copper wired old landline system. No problems at all and speed is awesome. BT are sooooo slow to upgrade to fibre outside the cities and big towns and still havn't installed fibre to our area, so it was a very good decision.

Could have wrote the same post! Sky bill for tv and broadband has just gone up to £144 a month and internet is rubbish, drops out all the time. Out of contract end of August and trying to work out who to go with next.

If your internet is rubbish with Sky broadband coming through BT copper/landline wiring, it'll still be rubbish with any other provider using the same BT copper/landline wiring.

You need to move to a provider who uses their own cabling, which is usually Virgin.

We went through BT, Sky, TalkTalk and a couple of others over many years but the speed was pathetically slow and the outages were frequent - all due to the ancient BT copper/landline wiring on our estate - even the landline phone was poor.

When Virgin finally installed their cabling, we were one of the first to move to them, and all our neighbours have now moved to Virgin too.

We're with Sky and sadly have the same issues. The cutting out has gotten a lot worse recently.

I might be misunderstanding how it works but unless there is a fibre network installed in your area then they are running on the same system so switching won't improve performance. Ive also read that the routers provided are crap and is better to get your own.

We are sticking with Sky as we want the TV. If I switch to anyone else and have tv issues they will just blame the connection so having it all with them means they have to fix it.

Last time we had Sky out it took 3 different engineers. The last guy told me they had been bought and we're paying engineers a lot less and they weren't qualified.

And people bitch about the TV Licence...
We have BT broadband, largely because it was set up in the house when we moved in. No issues.
TV wise we use the smart TV and have Netflix and Prime. We don't pay for any other TV (no interest in sport).

We have BT full fibre, which is great. It cost about £30 on the introductory deal and when that finishes, I'll ring up and ask for a discount to stay, otherwise I'll switch to somewhere else.

For TV, we have one or two of Netflix, Now, Prime, Disney etc etc. Currently have Netflix and a £1 a month for 3 months deal on Now Movies, we've had Now on and off for years and never paid more than about a fiver a month for some aspect of it, deals are always available.

Where can I find that NOW offer?
I keep wondering about trialing NOW but can never find the offers people mention.

And, what do you watch it on? My smart TV (which is about 9yo) doesn't have a NOW app. I think the firestick on the upstairs TV might.

Just a word of caution if anyone chops and changes including Netflix, they have now put the price of the basic subscription up and you can't get back onto the old price if you change your current package.

I think you have to be an existing customer to get the good offers.

We also have a 9 ish YO smart TV and use a Roku stick (appears to be similar to Firesticks and Now sticks, it just plugs into a port in the back of the TV - disclaimer I don't know if there is universal matching up, or you probably need to check your ports and that the stick is compatible).

But in the past I've bought bundles where you can sometimes get a discount Now TV subscription with a stick so look out for those on Hotukdeals, often from Argos or Currys.

Once you're in, and your initial offer is running out, just log in and cancel. Then they offer a deal. If they don't offer a deal, let it run out. Maybe sign up to Prime or Netflix for a while. Keep an eye on your emails to see if you get any good offers in the future. It helps if you don't watch that much TV and are happy to wait until there's a good discount available to watch a particular series, rather than wanting to watch it at the earliest opportunity, but it works for us and it means that we spend hardly anything on TV subscriptions.

Thanks BarbaraofSeville, maybe I'll have a look at what offers I can find with a stick this autumn (tend to watch more films over the winter).
I have Netflix basic subscription and just tend to let it run (and will do so given the price increase in mentioned above) as both my sons also use it.
The bloke I'm seeing has a Prime subscription and I have that on my TV but never find much I want to watch on there.
Don't actually watch masses of TV, but the NOW offers always intrigue me.

We pay £47 for sky including fibre, we don't have sports or movies, but do have Netflix.

Every time mine is up for renewal I say I'm leaving as it's too much. I always get a good deal.