Big Welcome to Virgin Media Ireland

[Kushan]

Originally Posted by djfunkdup

i am trying hard to think of an example of a utility company forcing a customer to take a product they don't need or require so it subsidises the one they actually want lol does that happen in any other business model never mind utilities ?

It's quite a common thing to lure customers in with a cheap bargain in the hope you can make a good profit off of other items. Supermarkets make a loss of some products knowing you'll make up for it by buying others. Printers are famous for being sold at a loss and having expensive ink. Not exactly the same, but close enough.

I do wonder how much line rental actually costs Virgin. I assume they have to give BT a cut of it? I'm hoping with their VoIP rollout, they can drop the cost of line rental.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by djfunkdup

i am trying hard to think of an example of a utility company forcing a customer to take a product they don't need or require so it subsidises the one they actually want lol does that happen in any other business model never mind utilities ?

Or the other way round: BT Infinity requires you to have a phone line or you don't have broadband. The increase in line rental subsidises the broadband, obviously.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Or the other way round: BT Infinity requires you to have a phone line or you don't have broadband. The increase in line rental subsidises the broadband, obviously.

On BT however you physically have to have the phone line so you are actually paying for a necessarily part of the service, whilst on VM it's actually an additional and unconnected part of the service that costs VM more to provide but has no relation to your broadband at all.

I've always found it ironic how it'd cost me less to get VM to install a second line and maintain a second set of equipment than not to - as absurd as basically paying their engineers negative salary.