My existing 18-month M250 Broadband & Landline contract expires on 29 September 2024, at which point my monthly cost was due to rise from £26.05 to £59.10.
I was attracted back to Virgin Media by a newbie offer in March 2023. VM offered 250 Mbps for £3.56 a month less than I was paying Vodafone for an FTTC 38 Mbps service. I didn't actually need the higher VM speed, though, and I would have been happy to go back to a much slower speed to make significant savings. Vodafone have an offer, ending soon, for an FTTP 74 Mbps service, which works out at £21.67 a month (£25 a month plus a claimable £80 Gift Card) for a 24-month contract. That would have been my choice if I decided to leave VM.
So, I called VM (150 from my landline) at 08:05 this morning, selected option 4 ("to make changes to your package or tell us you're moving"), and then sub-option 4 ("if you're thinking about leaving us"), and was put through to a (human) CS agent almost immediately.
I told the agent that I was thinking of leaving because of the end-of-contract price increase, and gave him details of the Vodafone offer I had found. The agent was off-line for a minute or so, checking details, and then said that he could offer a new 18-month contract for the existing product for £26.10 a month (just a 5p increase on the existing contract). I accepted.
True, I could have saved a maximum of £4.43 a month with Vodafone (only £1.10 a month if the Gift Card offer failed to go through, for one or more of the many reasons explained in the T & Cs). But I've avoided the inconvenience of an Openreach engineer visit to install a new full fibre box (with potential problems with siting of the box), and I won't need to notify various businesses of my new landline number (I never take my old number with me when I switch), or reset wi-fi access codes on umpteen devices.
