Dan Howdle October 7th, 2024
Earlier in the year, Virgin Media threw out a raft of bundle offers offering bill credit or a 43" TV. Well, they're at it again, only this time your choices are either £150 bill credit or an Xbox Series S games console. That's pretty generous, especially if you already have an Xbox on your Christmas shopping list. The offer is on until Sunday 13 October. Here are all the deets…
These deals are only available up to and including 13 October 2024 (so just seven days total), so if you see one that suits your needs, you'll need to jump straight in and grab it. We don't know if they'll be repeating this offer any time soon.
It's available on a total of seven of Virgin Media's broadband and TV bundles. Here we'll take a look at four of them, but if you want to check out the others, you can head to our fully-featured Virgin Media bundle comparison tool.
Virgin Media's Bigger Combo Bundle + Movies is priced at £0 per month and currently comes with download speeds of about 132Mbps (you can switch it at checkout if you want something faster). To get some sort of idea how fast that is, we typically recommend around 60-100Mbps is a good speed for most households, unless it contains a lot of gamers. Gaming itself doesn't actually require much speed at all, however the slower your package the more time you're going to spend downloading games and updates. If you're getting the Xbox thrown in, speed may become that much more important.
This is another variant of the Bigger Combo Bundle we talk about above. This time, the broadband as standard with the bundle is 362Mbps (we swear Virgin Media just spins a wheel to decide which broadband goes in each bundle, but as before, you can change it as you please). On top, we have Virgin TV again with the excellent TV 360 box, but instead of movie channel options in the form of Sky Cinema, here that's replaced by the full range of Sky Sports channels, including both Sky Main Event and Sky Sports F1. Virgin Media used to also include what was then BT Sport (now TNT Sports), but since the brand changed hands, the deal with BT that Virgin Media had is no longer in place. You can, however, add TNT Sports to this bundle as you please once you're up and running with your package, it'll just cost you extra on top of the package's price of £69.99 per month.
Priced at £0 per month, Virgin Media's Biggest Combo TV Bundle providers download speeds of around 362Mbps. If that's not fast enough for you, worry not. You can select any speed you desire to go in the bundle by clicking 'Customise my bundle' during the sign-up process. The 'Biggest' part of the bundle refers to the TV offering, where you get over 210 channels that includes both Sky Sports and Sky Cinema, as well as all Sky Entertainment channels in HD (except Sky Atlantic). You'll also get a Netflix subscription, which you can make use of even if you already subscribe to Netflix thanks to the ability to connect your existing account to the Virgin Media version, thereby either getting it free or if you're on a high-tier Netflix subscription currently, getting a substantial monthly discount.
Our pick of this bunch (if you can afford it at £84.99 per month) is the Mega Volt Bundle. Yes, it's not cheap, but hold on a moment, because 'value' and 'price' aren't always the same thing. You'll get ludicrously fast 1130Mbps broadband (Gig1), and every channel under the sun in the Mega Volt Bundle, including Sky Sports, Sky Cinema, Sky Entertainment and a free Netflix subscription. You'll also get an O2 SIM with unlimited data you can easily transfer your existing number to. So if you're already paying for a mobile package and a Netflix subscription, the price of the Mega Volt Bundle starts to look rather small, and represents the cheapest possible way to get that sort of broadband speed and indeed the full spread of premium Sky channels.
The advantage of bill credits is you get the benefit right out of the gate. Unbeknownst to most people, cashback reward cards have to be claimed by the customer within a tiny window of time months after your deal has started and if you forget, you lose the reward. Not so here. You'll just get the £150 taken off your first few months' bills. That means that for at least one of the lower priced packages, you'll actually have nothing to pay until the fourth month.
As games consoles go, this one is, admittedly, not the king of the castle. It's a cut-down version of the uber-powerful Xbox Series X, meaning lower resolutions and sometimes slower frame rates than its flagship brother. However, these things won't be important to everyone, and you can play everything on the S that you can on the X, it just won't be quite as visually shiny. An absolutely cracking Christmas present, especially if you couple it with a Gamepass subscription.
There are currently no set-up fees on any of these Virgin Media bundles. It's been a while since Virgin Media charged for this, but when they do, it's usually £35.
Each of these deals comes on an 18-month contract and, depending on whether you already have a Virgin Media cable coming into your home, will in most cases require an engineer visit to install. That 18-month contract provides a bit more flexibility than you'll find elsewhere as many providers are now locking users into two year contracts. Typically set-up takes around two weeks and please bear in mind that you're renting your home, you will need permission from your landlord as installation requires running a cable through your exterior wall and into your home. So some slightly messy drilling is needed.
The Cable.co.uk broadband customer survey asked 6,000 UK broadband customers what they thought of their broadband provider. Virgin Media came out near top for speed satisfaction. That is, how close to the speed promised its customers actually received.
A final note – something worth mentioning if you're not aware. Unlike most other providers, who use the Openreach infrastructure and are therefore available to almost everyone, Virgin Media operates on its own distinct network. For this reason it's not available to everyone. Currently around three out of five homes can get it. You can check if it's available at your address using out Virgin Media postcode checker. The are constantly rolling out to new areas though, so if it's not avaiable to you now, that doesn't mean the situation won't change in the near future.
Cable.co.uk's broadband postcode checker will find you the best deals, providers and speeds where you live. It's free and takes less than a minute to check and compare.