I fear they'll probably let a few go to discourage routine haggling. Lack of competition let's them do this.
I ended up ringing up and hitting 4 for the cancellation. Guy on the line answered within seconds and was generally very helpful. They do definitely care more about getting new customes, then retaining older ones, which is a little annoying - but still ended up going from paying £112 a month (due to the expiry of the deal I previously had signed up for early last year - previous to that, pre-inflation adustment, it was £61 a month as I was a new customer at the time) for 1 GIG downloads and TV (including the free BT Sports they used to offer) to £101 for the same but plus all the Sky Sports stuff. I was paying £36 for NowTV for Sports + HD boost anyway - so with this new deal it's £47 cheaper than what I've paid for the past few months, and only £4 more then when I had their promotion offer and the NowTV for Sky Sports (and now having to pay for TNT sports - but at a reduced rate). Also, my connection is a bit dodgy in the back of the house where my home office is (currently I have a 40m long ethernet cable that goes all around the house to my back window, and then connects to my laptop wired) so they are sending some free WiFi pods to create a mesh network which will be useful.
Not sure if that was the retention dept, or someone pre-retention to screen, but still happy enough with the deal to not try haggling too much. Having had a look on Sky, their best offer for new customers seems to be £88 for the 145 Mbps and TNT Sports - but that would be "streaming" across the internet service, and I don't actually live in an area where they provide that speed. Going down to their 61MBps service, due to a special offer on this as a package with 145, seems like it would cost £150 which is crazy that half the speed would cost 17 quid more! So for an extra £11 I am getting the much faster speed, with the WiFi pods to create the mesh, a proper TV box with hard drive (so I can watch programs without the internet if I need to) if compared to the "ideal" locations where Sky do provide decent speeds, or £4 less than the reality (and barely good enough to stream and game internet). The TV part alone from sky, with TNT Sports and Sky Sports is £74 a month.
100% my most positive interaction with Virgin media customer services ever; I then had to order the WIFI pods as mentioned (and an engineer had even came on Monday to fit a new TV box as the old one had HD issues - and tested it himself), and that was less pleasant. Had to wait 5 mins for faults to pick up, then had to walk around the house for 5 mins testing the connection, before he finally believed me (and the engineer) and actually started the process of ordering the pod - which then took 5-10 mins more.
