Virgin Media to hike prices from November

Qexit. Go to http://www.18185.co.uk/ I've been using them for a decade or more via Virgin and BT. You dial a number (put it into your phone's memory – cell or land llne) followed by the number you want to call. A nice lady tells you how much it will cost per minute (1p usually). That's it. Nothing on your Virgin bill. Calls to the US are often FREE or at most 10p per hour. It seems too good to be true but they buy unused time and so costs are tiny. See their website. http://www.18185.co.uk/

Virgin Media are driven by the same force as all the other telecomms companies: the demand for increased profits every year by their shareholders. Every year at around the same time for the last five or so years, I receive the same letter telling me how sorry they are and how reluctant they are to increase their prices ... but they are going to do it anyway. The standard increase is either £3.49p or £3.99p per month....every year. So the price of my bundle has more than doubled in the last five years. To keep it affordable, I had to reduce the 'features' in my landline package. So no more 'free' calls to 0845 numbers (thank heavens for the SayNoTo0870 site for continuing to provide alternative numbers to use). While it is true that my broadband speed has increased over that time, it started at 50mbs and got increased to 70mps around 2 years ago. This speed increase was given to me with much emphasis on how it was a free increase at no additional cost. I do get tired of reading about all the new features that I now have access to but which I neither want, need, use or could use even if I wanted to. For this stuff, I get increased monthly bills. I could switch to another provider but the truth is they are all much the same. Like the Utility companies, they act as if they are an unofficial cartel. When one increases their prices, the others all follow suite a short time later. If this were a competitive market, the other companies would sit back and watch new customers flock to them when another company increased their charges. Instead, they all just se how much the poor, over-charged customers are still willing to pay before increasing their own prices to something sinilar.

cd and Chuck, I feel for you. On the south coast, for 10 years I had struggled to get 2.5Mbps ADSL from BT and Cable and Wireless before I moved to Virgin. The day they switched on my line the broadband speed jumped twentyfold and is now between 25 and 30 megabytes a second. That's a gigabyte in less than a minute, the minimum I find acceptable in the 21st century. Prior to that the best I could get was with bonded ISDN at over £300 per month and for some reason I couldn't get calls through to Docklands.