Are Virgin Media slowly becoming irrelevant?

bealtine

https://irelandoffline.org/2024/04/are-virgin-media-becoming-irrelevant/

As outlined here…

z80CPU

the more Virgin embraces En$hitification.

UTJAMS

Virgin BB over 1Gb SIRO costs me €30 per Month.

I'm OK with that.

dunworth1

what a strange website. last post before this one was back in 2021

ednwireland

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122034117#Comment_122034117

used to be huge on here back in the day. it's how I found boards. didn't even realise it was still around.

virgin media has always been irrelevant to me.

archived forum

https://www.boards.ie/categories/irelandoffline

Tork

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122034114#Comment_122034114

Are you a new customer? I was with them years ago and had no choice but to leave when they refused to give me a competitive quote to stay with them.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122034117#Comment_122034117

I was surprised to see they were still going. I think the site originally started up in the early 2000s. The trigger might have been when people using IOL's No Limits off-peak dial-up internet were chucked off the service for using it too much.

bealtine

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122034114#Comment_122034114

That's a great price…hold onto it.

We've gotten a few emails from people complaining they're being charged up to 100€ every month, some 80€ and others 60€. It seems to be that people who up for renewal and are in coax only areas that get charged by lotto numbers…

bealtine

We've been quiet for a while and were busy on other things:) We've gotten a number of emails about the exorbitant renewal lotto that VM seem to be running…

Glaceon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122034169#Comment_122034169

Spot on, that was what got them started. "Not in keeping with the spirit of the service"… I'll remember that one forever! 😂

Tork

I narrowly escaped IOL's disconnection-fest only because I was away from home a lot in those days. This is a newspaper article from when everything was rosy in the garden. According to Hargaden's inflation calculator, £20 in 2000 was €38.30 at the end of 2023. The 58p technical support is €1.11 in today's money. I hope they were better at answering the phone in those days than communications companies are now!

purifol0

Pretty useless OP. Doesn't even mention that renters don't buy landline services at all. And are quite happy using their mobile phone for everything, including hotspots for laptop and TV streaming.

If that's the extent of the analysis on Ireland offline the site itself has become obsolete far quicker than virgin media's dociss tech or businesss model

fritzelly

Reads more like someones ramblings, hardly journalism

Tork

To be fair, the organisation and the site are of their time. Thankfully there are more options for people now, depending on where they live.

Back to the original point, I'd much prefer to see Virgin Media trying to compete in the fixed broadband market. That isn't as competitive as the mobile phone market is, and we're now starting to see annual price hikes. Broadband prices usually shoot up once your new customer contract is up. Trying to beat the price back down again is painful, as is moving provider.

bealtine

"Back to the original point, I'd much prefer to see Virgin Media trying to compete in the fixed broadband market. That isn't as competitive as the mobile phone market is, and we're now starting to see annual price hikes. Broadband prices usually shoot up once your new customer contract is up. Trying to beat the price back down again is painful, as is moving provider."

The site became obsolete back in about 2020, the mission statement of IrelandOffline was "broadband for all", so as that has mostly happened (with a few glitches here and there) there wasn't much need for any more activism on that front.

Now the mission is more on a more reactive basis, if people contact us on specific issues that matter to them we can do some limited analysis and exposure of those issues, this is one issue that we've been contacted on a few times now.

Some people have been charged up to 100€ for basic broadband (+TV) services and we think that even though they've little choice as there's currently, no alternative infrastructure, they have little choice but to pay up and then they will become annoyed and resentful and the moment they have an alternative they'll vote with their wallets and VM will have lost a customer (and revenue). Fibre is slower to roll out in urban areas mostly due to older infrastructure and lack of ducting but it is slowly happening and customers will vanish the moment they have a choice.

Essentially this behaviour by VM is reminiscent of the old Eircom behaviour, "you've no choice so we'll charge whatever we want" when the norm for these services is now around 30€/40€ per month yet 80/100€ is what VM are price gouging out of existing customers that wish to renew.

It's just plain suicidal greed.

Here's a piece from the Financial Times that is somewhat relevant:

https://www.ft.com/content/0a5d30ed-164f-4b9f-a049-fc9692219f79

irishgeo

I use my local supplier 500gb over siro. Flawless. No price rises in 2 years.

None of this inflation linked price rise. A door to door seller called annoying the wife and wouldn't leave asking her all sorts of questions. I think he was from eir.

I told her next time someone calls just ask them if they have inflation linked price rises. And shut the door.

Tork

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122037108#Comment_122037108

Local supplier. So in other words not Eir, Vodafone, VM etc?

Tork

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122037093#Comment_122037093

Article is paywalled

RetroEncabulator

They'll just have to compete. They've a HUGE % of the market in the cities, largely due to Eircom's previous incarnations having been so underwhelming that they gave the urban broadband market away.

Eir's now effectively Iliad SA, and Infravia, both of which have serious telco backgrounds, unlike the investment funds that owned it previously.

Siro's well backed by ESB and Vodafone are one of the largest telcos in the world.

Virgin's owned by Liberty Global, which chops and changes constantly, jumping brand to brand and merging and demerging all over Europe. They've been doing well for a while, but their urban quality broadband monopoly is ending with more FTTH from OpenEir and Siro.

I suspect Virgin Media cable might be bought out by Vodafone or some kind of merger between Vodafone Ireland and Virgin Media Ireland (cable aspect only) and operationally integrated with Siro tbh. It's a good complement to their rollout as it would give them immediate urban footprint in areas they aren't all that strong.

bealtine

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122041151#Comment_122041151

It wasn't when I posted the link, it must have become popular since…

It's not that interesting really as most of the points are covered here on boards anyway:)

jeffk

Ive no choice in Dublin 15 its up to 14 or so for Eir etc or Virgin 500 upwards (just 50 upload not 100 is annoying)

I wonder how many more are stuck in this trap (I COULD look into mobile, but have two PCS, heating and Mesh wifi that need LAN connections)

bk

Yes, VM are definitely going to be losing market share with their current pricing.

I'm paying €76.50 for just 360Mb/s Broadband with VM! I live in an apartment where VM had been the only option for the past 15 years, not even Eir xDSL!

Fortunately OpenEir FTTH has become available in just the past few weeks, so I'll ironically jumping to Eir 1GB for €45! Big speed increase, quality increase and money saving.

I see VM making the same mistakes as Eircom did back in the day, sitting on the laurels, charging too much, hoping people don't leave for the new faster and cheaper competition.

It is sad to see, because UPC/VM where originally the ones shaking up the market, bringing (for the time) high speed broadband to many urban areas that had non or slow and expensive Broadband from Eircom. They brought really innovation and competition to the market and forced Eir to compete. We would be in a much worse place now without them. So sad to see they have lost this competitiveness. At least we have Siro now too adding competition to Eir.

RetroEncabulator

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122056401#Comment_122056401

Eir's predecessors didn't have any laurels. It was more like a few dried out twigs from an old Christmas tree they had lying around since the 1980s, but they sat on it anyway. They got great milage out of that old ISDN!

KildareP

Don't see them becoming irrelevant, per se. They're going absolutely hell for leather in parts of Tallaght at the moment running fibre here, there and everywhere in place of their existing co-ax network, while they've started expanding their own (wired) network beyond the strictly urban areas they've kept to in the past.

I would put money on a JV in the near future though - Vodafone and Virgin being the most probable as they would both be able to take advantage of each other's existing footprints for their own benefit, their existing networks (Virgin co-ax and Vodafone/ESB SIRO) tend not to overlap, ex-Vodafone could migrate their urban customer base off OpenEir onto upgraded ex-Virgin plant while ex-Virgin mobile could migrate their mobile MVNO into Vodafone.

It would also be familiar territory given their experience together with Vodafone Ziggo in Germany.