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They've just announced that ESPN will be free with the Virgin XL TV package, same as Setanta was but we'll be getting it in HD as well. Looks like ESPN Classic will be free on Virgin as well, which is a nice added bonus.

Good to know I'll be getting all the football again without having to pay anything extra.

Yeah, that was becoming quite a worry for a while there.

Fuck the football, its all about NCAA gridiron and the fast-approaching NHL season. I really hope they don't cut back on the US sports coverage. Well, maybe they could lose the lecrosse, but not much else!

Notice its £9 a month if you're a Sky customer (if you already get Sky Sports) which includes ESPN HD.

Much better than Setanta's £12.99 a month (plus £2.99 for any extra multiroom boxes).  Saves me £7 a month anyway!

How much a month is V+ on the XL package? Including Sky Sports, Movies, etc?

afaik, V+ is no more per month than standard virgin, just the box and installation costs extra. obviously sky sports and movies are extra. alot extra, in the case of sky sports.

derby, where you getting your figures from? on virgin its £8 if you already subscribe to sky sports, or £10 if you dont, or its completely free on the XL package, which is about ten quid more expensive than the lower packages, but you also get eleventy-million extra channels too.

I've had NTL/Virgin in the past and will never go back to it. My Parents have got Virgin and i find it incredibly slow, it freezes alot and on quite a few occasions it doesn't even show what's on and what's coming up next.

The ESPN package doesn't interest me as it will probably show alot of shit games just like Setanta did.

Sky+/hd all the way.

Ive never had a problem Virgin myself,im sure SKY HD is great but I cant justify £50 plus a month for telly.I pay £30 for Virgins Xl package ,Broad band and a landline.

From here Leggett:

https://espn.sky.com/default.aspx

Used to have Virgin but moved over to Sky about a year ago and couldn't live without sport in HD now!

No way would XL TV and Sky Sports cost another £50 a month. For £58 a month I get 10Mb broadband, phone line, TV XL and Sky Sports so I'd have thought you'd get it for another £30. Still a lot of money but I reckon its worth it for all the sport you get for the money.


No monthly fee for V+ on XL (£5 a month on M and L) but there is an install fee, this varies dependent on their promotions but you should always be able to negotiate them down to no more than £50.

.

I wouldnt pay for Sky Sports or any sport station.
Im at work when most of the games are on and im not that intersted anyway,if there is a game I fancy id rather watch it at the pub.

£30 for all three? Fucking bargain, gonna look into that as i'm not arsed about Sky Sports at all.

Cheers Yeovybaby :D

It may be slightly more now,we phoned up and said we were going to leave them and they gave us a years XL free

Well, at the moment, I think we are paying £46 (?) for Sky+ (incl sports & movies), plus £20 for phone/broadband a month. So even if I can get a package with all 3 for around £40, that's good enough for me!

I wonder if I can anything for recommending you

 8)  £30 each Ginge?

That sounds a good deal, i'll defo look into that!
Are you registered with them as Yeovil Red, Olive, Oevil Red, Yeovil Blue or Yeovil Black And White though? ;)

If you Pm me your home adress and phone number I send them your contact details via the customer support thing,I understand if you dont fancy dioing that though.Actually i might already have your phone number.

Top man, just PM'ed you.
I've contacted Virgin and will let you know how I get on!

Edit: I think I messaged you, can you let me know if anything has come through?
It isn't showing in my outbox thingie...

I'm now considering a virgin package as well, as it seems I can get some more TV in for what i currently pay for phone and broadband.

Anyone had trouble with virgin internet?

It blows everyone else out of the water - you actually get the speed they advertise all the time.

I've never had any problems with any of my Virgin services. But then some people seem to have a complete nightmare though you can say the same about Sky. Only thing to bear in mind is you don't get any of the Sky Sports interactive services on Virgin and you get a lot more HD channels on Sky.

I'd recommend ringing Virgin and trying to negotiate a better deal than they advertise on their website, make sure you mention you're thinking of switching from Sky and you want a better deal than you're already getting. It worked for me recently, I told them I was going to switch to Sky and they knocked a few quid off - fortunately they weren't aware I can't get Sky where I live.

Its fucking ace..............................I would never go back to BT

I don't have Sky, and BT deliver me perfect never-failing broad band which is why I'm concerned to switching to a worse service.

Have you ever checked the speed you get? Unless you live on top of a BT exchange the chances are you'll not be getting anywhere near the speed they sold you. As its different technology, with Virgin you get the full speed.

You won't find many people moaning about Virgin broadband, it really does rock. Only way to get 50Mb at the moment as well, plus they're already testing 200Mb.

Yes, BT deliver 15.3 MB/s to me.

To be honest 10 MB/s would do me fine so their M package would suffice.

I am on that fibre optic which in all honesty gives me the best porn streaming I have ever had

No more buffering here fella......oh no !

Those two statements seem to contradict one another.

axs, you live right by an exchange so you probably already get a fantastic connection, but I can confirm that I've been a BY/NTL/Virgin customer for years and the connection is brilliant. Customer service has really improved from the early days as well.

The new ESPN channel went live today. Pretty amazing the array of sports they've signed up for it in such a short space of time - football (EPL, SPL and the top leagues from Russia, Holland, Portugal, Germany and the USA), UFC, DTM and Aussie Rules. They've got the European basketball championship in September as well which might be worth a watch, the GB team is improving all the time with all the NBA players they've signed up.

Plus I can now watch at least some football in HD, which is good as sports look pretty average in SD on my plasma.

Really good news that they're keeping ESPN America going as a separate channel which they weren't planning to do originally. Add on ESPN Classic and I reckon Setanta going out of business is the best thing that's happened with sports coverage in years.

Nice for Sky to have some decent competition at long last, wouldn't surprise me if they are bricking it a bit now. Just a pity its a while before the Premier League rights are up for negotiation again - I can easily see ESPN going for at least 3 of the packages if not more.

I wonder if they'll be doing a UK Sports Centre show?

Yeah, all 2 NBA players.

Luol Deng and Ben Gordon

still a damn sight better than most of the rest of the GB team...

Up until 6 months ago I was paying BT £24.99 a month just for BB and that was on top of their phone line rental charges as well at £11 a month. Although the BB worked well and I dont ever recall losing connection, my speed never seemed to get past 4-5 Mbit even though i was paying for the 8Mb tier.

Now on Virgin, £30 a month, 10mb BB (usually sits around 8.5/9.5Mb) and that includes phone line rental and a cable tv box with the FTA channels on. *



*Swap this box for a Eurovox and you can get all the channels. So a friend tells me ;)

shame the espn classic does not come with the package. might have to purchase it.

ESPN Classic comes with Virgin TV XL - all the ESPN channels do. Don't see the point of just subscribing to ESPN if you're on a different TV package, you might as well pay the few quid extra to get everything.

That's what I've done, signed up for the XL package. The missus is happy, she gets national geographic now.

To be honest tho, I've only really got espn for the ice hockey.

when the listings dont come up all ya gotta do is restart it and it only does that in the mornings

Yeah its strange that Virgins broadband is the fastest yet scrolling through the screens to choose on demand programmes takes forever.  ::)

absolute bollocks. i have 50 mb broadband, most days i fire up youtube, by the time ive made a cup of coffee, had a wank and curled one out im still waiting for the clip to load.

i have v+ downstairs, a box upstairs, and a (chipped) box in my daughters room, sky sports, sky moves etc (the vip package) and it costs my 75 quid a month with internet and phoneline.
tell them you'll fuck off to sky and you'll end up getting discounted to fuck

That'll either be due to Youtube's servers or your PC, not the connection. If you've got 50mb then you must be on cable, which means your line is fixed speed and not adaptive like ADSL.

Or there is a fault on the line.

Or your internal network can't support the 50Mb speed.

What you seem to be saying is everyone on XL broadband has a 50mb speed coming into their house and if they get any less than that its due to their router or network cable??? Thats just not true. The speeds with virgin are still advertised as up to whatever mb and according to that recent broadband speed survey whilst virgin was by far the fastest ISP due to their use of cables but the speeds were still well below advertised max speeds for most users.

I assume you're not with virgin on the XL package. If so are you getting 50mb download speeds???!

50Mbit != 50Mbyte.

Just thought we'd stop any confusion there.

Hmmm, unless the technology's changed (which it may have done) since I used to work for Cable Internet (forerunner of blueyonder), that's not necessarily true. This was over 10 years ago, mind, so it may have changed since then, but back then it was a fixed speed into a block of addresses not an individual address. IIRC there was a line from the cable provider into a "head unit" (I think) which provided cable TV/internet for several addresses which then shared the bandwidth downstream from there. Usually there would be enough bandwidth into each head unit that most of the time you wouldn't be in contention with your neighbours so you would get the "up to" speed but if everyone on your head unit (or whatever it's actually called) was maxing out the connection, then you'd get a lower avg speed across that head unit thingy. Like I say, may have changed since then, maybe now they do individual lines to individual addresses but back then that was how CI worked and NTL (who are now Virgin).

But whatever else may have changed in the 10 years+ since I worked in the industry, one thing hasn't - I still can't get cable and from what I can tell am not likely to be able to before they start live coverage of the All-Satanic Beelzebub Ice Championships (or I move house)

I think what PaulD said is still the same in practice, but if you buy cable broadband at an advertised speed then you should be receiving there or thereabouts that speed. They say "up to" because it's dependent on your own equipment and wiring and they also have traffic shaping policies.

If you've signed up to 50mb and aren't getting anywhere near that then you really should raise a support call.

I'm on that package and I don't get speeds that fast. Our router does need replacing but even then I don't think we'd be getting that speed. I suspect not many people do.

My internet is a fucking joke. I should get 8mb, but actually hve never had more than 2.2mb, which is actually the max in my area. Anyway, it's been up and down like a whores knickers as of late, and yesterday i recorded a new low of 17kbps down and 783kbps up.. I haven't had better than about 480 (down) for over a month.

If i could get better bb i would, but i'm told my problems are not due to my provider but my 5 mile distance from the exchange. :(

Oh, yeah, even 10+ years ago, most of the time you should have been getting at or very close to the "up to" speed, it was only during very busy periods when contention would come into play. If you're getting nowhere near most of the time, there's a problem

OK maybe me and my housemates should look into this then!

You still share the speed with others, if you look into Virgin's contention ratios that will prove it. It's still quicker than adsl for many reasons though.

Do you have to have a phone line with Virgin to get the broadband/tv packages?

I'm pretty sure you don't.

I just tried to sort myself out with them and i'd need to move to BT to get Virgin, which costs £41.

As much as i HATE TalkTalk, £20 for line rental, calls and unlimited BB is pretty good, especially when you bare in mind i get free calls, 24/7 to landlines located in most of the developed world. But i really, really would like a reliable internet connection for once.

I've not heard from Virgin yet, it's a week now since I sent my details asking for someone to contact me.

Bastards.

just realised i have espn and espn america, not keep on the espn banners down the sides

You shoud, yes. Have you managed near the full 50mb in the past? Chances are if there's more than one of you frequently using the connection and constantly d/ling torrents etc. that your connection may have been capped by Virgin.

I'm in the process of switching to Virgin ADSL at the moment for the extra speed they offer. I'm not in a cable area (I live at no. 22 and they stopped it at 14 for some gay reason) and my exchange hasn't been ADSL2+ enabled yet, but Virgin are able to offer up to 16mb at my exchange through LLU.

Cool.

Changing to V+ HD in a month, as I have to give Sky a months notice.
I save over a £5 a month, it is HD, I get ESPN and broadband is 5x faster than my current 2mb!

Sorry Yeovil, apparently I can't use the refer a friend thing as i'm already an existing customer with Virgin and you can't use it in conjunction with any offers apparently (i'm getting the HD box half price at £49.00)