Brian wrote:
tim.... wrote:
"Brian" wrote in message
...
Derek G. wrote:
On Mon, 9 May 2011 10:53:44 +0100, "dennis@home"
wrote:


Its a marketing ploy..

It may very well be but AFAIAC it's costing them sales.

They want you to use all their services so they can make more
cash. The phone service is actually a cheap thing to supply and
people pay quite a bit to use it so profits are high.

I don't know how you decided VM was cheaper than sky though, it
isn't for me.


I pay £71 to Sky for the full bag of mashings inc. 1 HD box plus 1
sky+ box. + £9.00 /month for maintenance of the kit (free with
Virgin)

What's this £9/month for maintenance? I've never heard of that and
we've been with Sky for over 10 years (IIRC). If anything goes wrong
badly enough to need an engineer we just call Sky who, for a one-off
charge of £65, do whatever is necessary to get it working again,
whether that be a new dish, new cabling, new (refurb) box or
whatever.

I can see that as the customer you might have something wrong with
the dish that is your problem, but as you are RENTING the box from
them, if it goes wrong they should always be repairing/replacing it
FOC.

But you're not renting the box from them. You may be for the first
year or so but the box becomes yours after the initial 12-month
contract (or whatever length of contract it is). If I said tomorrow
that I wanted to quit Sky, they wouldn't send someone round to
collect the box or ask me to post it back to them. I could, if I
wanted to, put it on Ebay and sell it. IMHO the £65 to fix whatever
problem you may have is good value.

It's certainly better value than spending £9 - £12 per month on a
'maintenance contract'.

--
Kev