It’s coming up to the point of the year at which many students are starting to look for utility providers for their next student house. Virgin Media is one of the biggest ISPs with around 5.28-million subscribers in 2019 (choose.co.uk), and is a very popular choice for students due to the value offered.
Unless you are a student Virgin media don’t offer 12 months contracts as standard anymore. If you are a student visit the page https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/student to view the deals possible. You will have to wait until summer for the deals to be released online.
You can get £50 off your broadband from Virgin Media by using a referral code. Check out how…
If you are looking in general to make the best out of your money, then it is worth taking a look at a guide to getting the best deal possible when online shopping…
How can I get a 12 month virgin contract?
Although Virgin media “don’t” offer 12 month contracts, it seems you do still have options. If you get in touch with their support chat, you can ask for a 12 month contract and they’ll likely offer it. If you try a bit harder they may even offer you a £50 bill credit – they did for me. It is quite common that if you can barter with broadband providers about deals and they will offer you a better deal (which is a bit annoying for existing loyal customers).
Below you can see my web chat with Virgin Media. Although I use the context of being a student, it is likely that they will offer you a contract to your period if you ring up or message as generally they want your business.
What plans do Virgin Media offer for students? (Correct as of 2023)
Note that all of these are currently 18 month contracts. You will need to try and get in contact with web support to get a 12 month contract as I explain above. None of these contracts are specific deals for students. Virgin Media states they don’t offer a student discount.
M125 £30/mo
This is ‘good’ for houses with 5-9 devices. I’ve found that this is probably what is necessary for a student house. It worked mostly fine for my student houses, with a few hiccups along the way.
M250 £33/mo
If you are going to be doing lots of broadband intensive tasks on 10+ devices this might be worth the upgrade. If you are all planning on streaming video content on many devices at once, this will make it a bit smoother and hopefully less lag. Since there is a lot more content delivered online currently it is probably worth this upgrade.
M350 £39/mo
This is very fast broadband. If you expect to be downloading lots of large files regularly (and speed of download is required) then this may be a necessary upgrade.
Gig1 £50/mo
Once again, this is fast broadband, if you want even faster downloads, pick this. This is really only necessary for the power user. It becomes quite arbitrary whether to upgrade at this point unless you are doing some serious downloading/streaming and you are probably throttled more by the websites you use then your own broadband.
How to get an Aklamio referral code? Get up to £50 back.
Aklamio acts as a refer a friend scheme for Virgin media where if you refer a friend both you and your friend get £50. This is great for getting money off your bill. However, you can not according to my discussions with the Virgin media online help desk use an Aklamio code when setting up a ‘custom’ 12 month contract.
To set up this cash back to share with your friends visit:
https://virginmedia.aklamio.com/
To use my cash back code:
http://aklam.io/miS5Zt
How to find alternatives?
There are some good comparison sites like USwitch and MoneySupermarket. Another alternative is to look for a bill splitter that handles it all for you. As long as that has a reasonable contract length then you will not have to deal with Virgin Media (or any other providers) yourself at the end of the year. You will just have to pay the bill splitting company. Be wary when choosing these as quite a lot have negative reviews, so make sure to check all their socials (and review sites) to find out the views of other customers.