Changing internet providers

[old martParticipant @oldmart]

I have had a Sky account for over fifteen years, which includes tv, phone and internet. I seem to pay well over the odds and the internet speed is slow considering that I live in the second biggest town in Somerset.

Things are changing, as today, Virgin have just finished laying fibre optic cable in our street. It will be ready to go in the next few weeks and I will be changing to Virgin for tv, phone and internet, which may well be up to 6 times as fast as my present speed for less than half the outlay for the first year and then 3/4 what I am paying now.

I have lots of internet accounts including this forum, and would like to know the best way of changing over. I thought of changing the accounts to a Gmail address from the SKY one before getting the new Virgin address to make sure things don't go horribly wrong at the last minute. What do you think I should do?

[old martParticipant @oldmart]

[EmgeeParticipant @emgee]

I changed to a gmail address a long time ago exactly for the same reason, it's available across devices and providers.

Emgee

[Brian Sweeting 2Participant @briansweeting2]

I may be wrong if things have changed but we changed from Sky to Virgin about 18 months ago. I have always had a Gmail account but the Sky account remained active when I was on Virgin.

Six months ago we reverted to Sky and I found the the Sky.com account was still functioning.

I have found that some manufacturers technical websites that I used would not allow me to register with the Gmail account because they like a "real" address as against a web based service .

My suggestion would be not to rush into it but yes change your accounts at a pace that suits you.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

What ISPs do when you dump them varies but the old email should be active for a month, and perhaps forever (provided it's used).

See here for a summary of who does what. For example, Sky and Talktalk maintain emails forever, Virgin for 90days then stop dead, BT maintain service for one month free, then charge £5 a month.

ISPs might change their minds, or it depends on a particular deal when the customer signed-up. As continuity isn't guaranteed the best approach is to change ISP and then login to all accounts based on or using email for billing purposes with the old email and change the account to use the new ISP's email address. Do this fairly quickly, but it's not a rush job. My experience changing email addresses over was straightforward: it's a common change and the option to do it online will be on their account management page somewhere.

Dave

 

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 11/10/2019 17:27:58

[OldironParticipant @oldiron]

I live in the East Midlands and have Virgin broadband & phone + 3 mobiles. Just into year 2. I have no complaints whatsoever with speed etc. Now paying much less than I did with BT and no line rental. My connection speed is always over 200Mbps. The most I ever got on BT was 63Mbps Never a problem on Virgin no matter how many pc's tablets or phones we have connected. And calls between all our mobiles and landline are free.   Just tested my old BT email and it is still live at no cost

Edited By Oldiron on 11/10/2019 17:40:32

Edited By Oldiron on 11/10/2019 17:41:41

[Nick Clarke 3Participant @nickclarke3]

Posted by Brian Sweeting on 11/10/2019 16:18:41:

I have found that some manufacturers technical websites that I used would not allow me to register with the Gmail account because they like a "real" address as against a web based service .

And this is also useful if you are looking for sample electronic components – many manufacturers will go out of their way to support designers.

[Douglas JohnstonParticipant @douglasjohnston98463]

I changed to Virgin a few years ago and the price was good for the first year but it has shot up every year since. The increases have always been much greater than inflation and I am now paying over £50 a month for internet and landline, with phone calls on top of that, and their not cheap either.

I have been thinking of changing provider but may just ring them up and threaten to move and see if they give me a better deal.

Doug

[RMAParticipant @rma]

I change supplier on a regular basis as soon as they hike up the price. I have loads of redundant routers to prove it! Do your homework before you phone them, that way you have a benchmark to work to. I always go via Topcashback, always good deals to be had there. Loyalty with most companies these days is not respected, so play them at their own game.

[EmgeeParticipant @emgee]

Hi Douglas

Pretty sure you will be able to find a much better deal by moving, you don't say if you are on fibre but you are certainly paying fibre rates.

Emgee

[Douglas JohnstonParticipant @douglasjohnston98463]

Yes Emgee I am on fibre broadband, but to be honest they have raised my broadband speed twice and I hardly notice any difference. I will do my homework then ring Virgin and see what they can offer. Trouble is moving provider can be a hassle and they may just say:- we don't want you if you are not prepared to pay the full whack.

Doug

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Virgin now have 1Gbps available in Southampton and rapidly covering the rest of the country. Not sure what people do with it. I have 500Mbps and this site works fine. the price rises are because someone keeps saying make it faster and the equipment becomes obsolete within 3 years so keeps having to be replaced.

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

I think you have to review what your total usage is going to need. When my son and his girlfriend were in residence then we could be supplying him on a game her on social media, my wife streaming a tv catch-up and me on YouTube. There is no point in buying something you don’t need or use. A reasonably fast connection does make surfing the Internet a more satisfying experience but depending on what you are doing the law of diminishing returns does kick in and a 1Gb connection will not greatly improve a solo user experience, of course we don’t want to go back to a 56kb dial up connection as the much more complex sites need more horsepower to provide a satisfactory performance.

Mike

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Bazyle on 11/10/2019 23:57:22:

Virgin now have 1Gbps available in Southampton and rapidly covering the rest of the country. Not sure what people do with it…

Two factors effect network performance – bandwidth and latency. It's usually latency that causes poor performance, but the two are related in that using all the bandwidth results in queuing and repeat requests that can bring the whole thing to a halt. Available bandwidth isn't simply linked to the service the customer buys because the network infrastructure is shared with other users. The performance you get depends on whatever technology has been installed in your area plus whatever the rest of the world is doing.

Most of what I do on the internet is lightweight. A bit of email and basic web-browsing. My heaviest activity is typically downloading and updating software – operating system upgrades, new applications and security. All this worked fine with a 10Mbs service that usually ran at about 8.5Mbs but dipped to about 5Mbs for about an hour when the neighbourhood teenagers got back from school. Upgrading to a 54Mbs fibre to cabinet service gave my household of two noticeably slicker performance – no buffering – and eliminated any hint the neighbours are active.

Teenagers and young adults make far heavier use of the internet than my generation. More TV is streamed online than watched off-air, much of it coming down the line from an On Demand service in High-Definition. Most people prefer to watch programmes when they want rather than waiting for a broadcast. The same people are into gaming, synchronising devices, and other network-heavy activities like sharing videos and high-resolution photographs on Social Meja. When an entire family is doing this with 3 or 4 simultaneous streams, the network load is massive, and it's well worth investing in the latest technology. Worth knowing that upgrading to a fibre service not only increases bandwidth, but it also reduces the number of bottlenecks in the wiring.

At the moment demand for network capacity in the UK exceeds the ability of providers to deliver it.

Dave

[Brian GParticipant @briang]

You could consider getting your own .co.uk or .uk domain, then you can keep the same email address whatever ISP you use. I set my son up with hisname.co.uk (if you see what I mean) when he was 11 and my wife and I now do the same as well. It costs about £12 a year if you don't want mail hosting (I just autoforward from brian@myname.co.uk to outlook.com or gmail).

Brian

[old martParticipant @oldmart]

I get around 8Mbits at present with SKY which is less than what I got 5 years ago, (14Mbits). The Virgin fibre is advertised at over 100Mbits at present, which is more than I could even imagine. The 1Gps is the sort of speed that an office block would need.

[Colin WilksParticipant @colinwilks45682]

I was bombarded with Virgin bumph for several years and always ignored it as the change seemed expensive, although I frequently checked their website, so they knew I was in the market. Eventually a real live human being knocked on my door and signed me up at £20 a month on a reduced speed and capped data limit, which was good enough for me.

I think we need to get smarter at beating their algorithms. My wife went onto a posh website to buy a jersey for a friend but did not complete the payment bit at the end. Next thing she gets an email with a 20% discount code. Just like in the souk it pays to walk away!

[Andrew EvansParticipant @andrewevans67134]

It looks like the Sky email address will continue to work indefinitely – **LINK**. The reason for that is it would cost more in admin costs for Sky to delete it than the fractions of a penny it costs them annually to keep it running.

Do you have an Android mobile phone? If so you will already have a gmail email address. If not it is is easy to create one or a yahoo email address – or there are many other free email providers.

If you do want to change your email address on the various sites you use each site will have a way to easily do that – e.g. on this site it is settings => my account from the top menu bar. Changing your broadband provider shouldn't have any effect on the way you log in to your various websites and forums – your user name and password won't change (even if your user name happens to be your Sky email address it is unimportant if that is still a valid email address or not). In fact you can't change your user name on many sites. e.g. if your email address is old.mart@sky.com and your username on a site is old.mart@sky.com you can change your email address any time you want say to old.mart@gmail.com but your username will always be old.mart@sky.com – they are 2 different pieces of data that just happen to have the same value when they are first created.

What I would do is set up a new gmail / yahoo email address, then create a rule in your Sky email system that forwards on new messages to your gmail address – that way you won't miss any emails. Then stop using the Sky address and gradually update your email address in the various websites you use. At some point you won't get any new messages to your Sky account and you can forget about it.

[Andrew EvansParticipant @andrewevans67134]

Rapidly changing technology and broadband demand means that superfast fibre is going to be needed across the country – a house with a couple of TVs streaming 8K movies, the kids listening to lossless streamed music and playing the latest Playstation game requires a huge amount of data that the old BT copper lines can't support.

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