[gunner45]

At first glance, reports that VMO2 is considering resurrecting Virgin Mobile look odd. VMO2's existing budget brand is giffgaff (owned by O2), which costs little to run - being no-frills, community-moderated, and built around a SIM-only identity where plans are rolling and contract-free (and any phone financing is handled separately via Klarna rather than traditional bundled handset contracts). I'm very familiar with giffgaff, having been a customer for several years, and it works well.

However, what works far less well is when Virgin Media and O2 - operating as a 50:50 joint venture - try to market their services together. Volt is awkward: take Virgin Media broadband, TV, and landline, and they add O2 mobile benefits on top. There is no getting around the fact that Volt is essentially a marketing wrapper stitched over two entirely separate corporate billing systems and customer databases. Relaunching Virgin Mobile as a sub-brand would actually be quite cheap. O2 already handles SIM distribution, Virgin Media's billing system, which I believe to have been recently rewritten, should be able to accommodate a mobile tier, and VMO2's call centres are already set up for it, having simplified team structures and cross-trained roughly 5,000 existing staff to handle broadband, TV, landline, and mobile enquiries in a single call in 2025.

That points to the real rationale for resurrecting Virgin Mobile as a sub-brand: bundling it directly with Virgin Media's broadband, Pay TV, and VoIP on 24-month contracts with none of the awkwardness of Volt, giving customers a single bill for the lot. Positioned as a retention tool to keep valuable broadband and Pay TV households, it wouldn't need O2 Priority perks, uncapped 5G speeds, or flagship handset subsidies. And fenced off as a broadband bundle add-on, it shouldn't cannibalise either premium O2 or standalone giffgaff (which serves an entirely different, unbundled market).

On reflection, there's a lot to like about the proposal.