Creased Lightning: Profits wobble at Virgin Media while fibre project stays sluggish Virgin Media's operating income slid 17 per cent over the past year despite the Brit telco growing its Q2 2018 revenues to £1.275bn, creating interesting conditions for its newly acquired chief operating officer. Of the total quarterly revenue, £903.9m came from residential cable subscribers. Business subscription revenue …
They're going to wobble even more now that they've ditched UKTV in favour of Horsey TV, Paramount HD, Vice(!) and Nascar
Only if customers take their business elsewhere. I know it swamped their customer service capabilities for a couple of weeks when they lost those channels, but I expect that despite the extensive anger, relatively few will actually leave. A greater cause for customer losses may be when us unlucky punters are stuffed with this year's inflation busting price hike.
Well if some other ISP was able to get me the 200Mbps that I pay Virgin for (it can go up to 350Mbps), then I would gladly ditch the unicorn botherers. F***ing price of it is stupid, and there's hardly anything good on there now. I wish I'd kept the satellite cabling in. In fact, I might run a fresh cable out to the dish... at least I'd get SOME UKTV channels back that way.
Well if some other ISP was able to get me the 200Mbps that I pay Virgin for (it can go up to 350Mbps)
Each to their own, but I've not felt the "free" speed increases since I reached 60 Mbps, and I'm now also on 200 Mbps. I don't presume to tell you what is right for you, but in my case, other than a multithread speed test the entire household online together can't saturate anything above a 30 Mbps connection, and rarely above 20 Mbps. I'd agree that downloads go faster with more bandwidth (again, so long as multithreaded, and on a high bandwidth server), but when I consider the amount of time I actually spend looking at spinning circles, if that were four times as long, it really wouldn't matter.
This is Virgin Media's poorly kept secret - that they openly promote and sell higher bandwidth contracts than most customers will ever use, and even those who can sometimes use the full bandwidth have very low capacity utilisation even when on line. If mortgages, insurance or energy were sold like this, the relevant regulators would rip the balls off the companies' concerned. Ofcom, on the other hand, apparently exist to encourage this sort of abuse.
"Only if customers take their business elsewhere"
We did (business connection), mainly because every time anything went wrong with our 1Gb/s ethernet link it'd take 2-3 days before the bickering between BTOR and Virgin allowed things to be fixed (It was always a recurring OR problem, but Virgin always dragged feet on getting someone out to identify the fault and declare it as such, because OR would charge a fortune for callouts)
That's how BT manage to undermine their opponents - bearing in mind that OR have a monopoly on the "last mile" in so many areas and are able to do this with ease at interconnects.
.... if only they offered the new customer deals to THOSE OF US STUCK WITH VERMIN MEDIA.....
I'm only with them because of the fibre broadband...... that NyNex built , went bust, sold to NTL, merged with telewest, branded by Vergin and bought out by liberty.
At least thats what was that was the company names painted out on the guy's overall when he came to fix my phone............ which worked for 10 days before goign 'phhtt' again.....
Not fibre, but they give me a reliable connection with reasonable contention ratio through a reliable coaxial cable. That's a good reason not to switch to a corroded twisted pair.
To solve the problem I employ my rottweiler (wife) to phone them yearly to match their new customer deals - and they will if they think you're really going to leave.
and they will if they think you're really going to leave
But with an overlay based on the number of products you're buying, the margin on those, and a purchased dataset that indicates whether you use price comparison websites or switch energy suppliers and insurers. Merely saying "I'll leave" is not sufficient, because their customer analytics have been tuned to identify that not all customers tell the truth, and the commercial risk is a product of customer value x anticipated propensity to change suppliers.
This is price discrimination. It isn't legal in energy, is marginally legal in financial services, but it is totally legal in telecoms.
I found that VM are wise to the “threaten to leave” strategy. So to get their best deal I left and came back as a new customer. I did it before my annual vacation (handing back the old VM box in person at their shop) and then re applied once back home, surviving on a tethered mobile until connected.
A faff overall, especially having to get an “engineer” to visit just to switch on a new box, but I thought ultimately worth it despite the inconvenience.
Their ICOMS system is driven by address, so it does not even realise Mr Smith at 123 the High Street was the same Mr Smith as before. The VM ref number just gets incremented.
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"If they stopped sending me "sign up" junk mail every few days."
Last time I spoke to someone who knew the marketing business, he said it depends on the industry and saturation rate in an area. It's often cheaper to mail-bomb an area to every "Dear Occupier" than to target specific groups, eg non-customers.
I'd imagine we will see more of this now with GDPR in force as to produce a marketing list of non-customers, someone has to subtract the customer list from the full list and that's most likely to be the 3rd party marketing company. That means handing over a very valuable dataset along with the inherent risks of allowing all that personal information out of your direct control.
"If they stopped sending me "sign up" junk mail every few days."
I hit them with a DPA section 11 notice a while back - they claim they can't stop sending them (despite delivering to a specific address) because they have no record of the address in their system.
Some people have claimed that they've managed to get their addresses delisted from marketing by sending back postage due bricks.
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