Introduction to Virgin Media

Virgin Media is the UK's largest fibre optic cable provider, currently covering 50% of UK homes (mostly in urban areas). It is made up of the merger of a number of pre-existing cable companies like Telewest and NTL and is part-owned by Richard Branson.

The Virgin Media services

Virgin Media organises its digital TV, broadband and home phone services into four sizes, M, L and XL, XXL. You can select the size that best fits your needs.  If you live outside a Virgin Media cable area, it also offers a Virgin Media National DSL broadband and home phone package (but no TV services).  You can use the postcode checker on the Simplifydigital.com website to check if you are in a Virgin Media cable area.  

The basic broadband package (L) provides a 10Mbps service with unlimited downloads. Broadband XL gets you 30Mbps (significantly faster than any ADSL broadband provider is able to offer).  And the XXL package offers speeds of up to 50Mbps. Virgin has also just launched an up to 100Mbps broadband service and is currently rolling out the service nationwide.

Virgin Media's digital TV packages offer between 40 - 160 channels. Premium Sky movies and Sky Sports packages are also available. Virgin Media TV subscribers get access to 500 films and thousands of shows on demand. Watch them when you want, pause them, rewind them. It's as easy as watching a DVD. Virgin media does not have as much HD (high definition) TV content as Sky, but its HDTV channel range is growing fast and it has a large library of on-demand content in HD.

Also Virgin Media lets you watch BBC iPlayer on your TV. So if you've missed your favourite BBC show, you don't have to settle for watching it on a computer monitor.

Virgin Media has a PVR (personal video recorder) like Sky+, called a V+ Box. It lets you pause and rewind live TV. You can record two programmes at once, while watching a third. XL TV subscribers get the V+ box for free. Everyone else has to pay a monthly fee to 'rent' the box from Virgin Media.  Virgin Media has done an interesting deal with TiVo, the US PVR manufacturer, to roll-out a next generation PVR in the UK.

Virgin Media encourages all subscribers to take their home phone line rental. It's not necessary, but it does make the digital TV and broadband packages cheaper.

Benefits of Virgin Media

Virgin Media remains the UK's largest and oldest-established provider of fibre optic broadband. Fibre has a number of major benefits, allowing faster broadband speeds. 

Indeed Ofcom's latest research shows that Virgin Media broadband delivers 90-96per cent of the advertised "up to" broadband speed, versus 78per cent for BT Infinity (the BT fibre optic broadband service) and just 29 per cent for the other ADSL broadband providers such as Sky, TalkTalk, BT Broadband etc. All these broadband services are ideal for busy families who are online a lot and who may have more than one person online at any one time. 

In addition, Virgin Media has recently come first in Ofcom's 2011 survey of broadband and home phone complaints, with 9 times fewer home phone complaints and six times fewer broadband related complaints than the worst offender - TalkTalk.