Ads bandog berates Virgin Media in BSkyB broadband bumf bust-up Virgin Media was successfully muzzled by rival BSkyB today – for failing to adequately explain the basis of a savings claim it made in a direct mail, and for omitting material that showed the differences between competing services. The UK's ad watchdog upheld two of three complaints submitted by BSkyB in which it moaned about …
" I can fast-forward my way through all this nonsense!"
And that's getting more inconvenient with these stupid variable length adverts. And the ones where the channel ident/trailers come up and you think you've skipped the ads and another fscking advert appears before the show.
Another week passes, another ASA story...
Just moved house, took my cable service with me. Gave VM 2 days notice - they switched me off on the right day, connected the new place the next morning. Small hitch was that the cables from the street had been cut, so the engineer ran a cable from next door as a temporary fix, and ordered a re-pull the next week. Left me his card (and his pliers) with a note to say that if I phoned the switchboard I'd be put through to his mobile.
Aside from the text messages confirming appointments (had to stop answering them as the wife was getting suspicious) an all round excellent service.
I caught 5 minutes of police interceptors the other week. They found a cannabis farm and a bypassed electric meter at someone's house, the CPS obviously didn't catch the episode as there was "insufficient evidence to prosecute". (Probably too busy with celebrities who'd touched someone's bum in the 70s).
> But BSkyB successfully challenged the offer as being misleading by being fuzzy with the figures.
That loud bang you heard was my irony meter exploding.
Sky's unlimited* broadband is £12.50 / month. Only it's not. There is an extra £5 fee for not taking a Sky phone line, an extra £2.50 fee for not taking Sky TV and a £0.50 charge for using a debit card to pay them.
If anyone says "It's all there on the website when you sign up" I'd point out that I was a Be customer who was involuntarily moved over as part of the 02 merger so I never even had the change to read the small print.
* "Unlimited" apparently means "Stutters on an audio only Youtube video during peak times." It really is quite shit.
When you were "moved" to Sky. That would have been a change in contract. Should you not have made sure you were informed before hand what the new contract was if you planned on staying with them?
It sounds like you should have moved service because you had no other services with them. You should have gone elsewhere as you only get it cheaper if you use their other services.
I've been with Virgin Media for years. VERY pleased with the speed and reliability of all services, and have always managed to renegotiate a decent package price each year.
However, I have to agree that the mailshots and online advertising they do is often very misleading. So many times I've spotted a 'New Customer' deal which looks much better than what I pay, but then when I start looking deeper into the offer, I find that it's a special price for only a few months, and often excludes the mandatory £15 phone line rental (a trick BT often also pull in their Broadband advertising).
I think that any contracted service should be forced to clearly advertise what the total monthly price will be for the duration of any contract, and clearly state what any increases will be at the end of that period. Having a shock increase mid-contract when there's nothing you can do about it is unfair.
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