Virgin Media Seeks To Press Home ‘Quad-Play’ Advantage With New Bundles

Steve McCaskill,

Virgin Media offers new landline, broadband, television and mobile bundles to customers to gain the edge over BT, Sky and others

Virgin Media is offering two new ‘quad-play’ bundles offering superfast broadband, premium television, landline and mobile services to consumers as the company seeks to gain a head start on its rivals, many of whom are as yet unable to offer all four to their customers.

The £50 ‘Big Kahuna’ bundle includes 152Mbps broadband, the TV XL package with a TiVo DVR, and a mobile SIM with 250MB of data, unlimited texts and calls, while the £35 ‘Big Bang’ bundle combines landline, 100Mbps broadband and the same mobile SIM offer.

The bundles are available to existing customers immediately and will be offered to new customers at the end of May, but both will require customers to take out an 18 month contract, and pay another £15.99 a month in line rental.

Virgin Media quad-play

Virgin Media Landscape“For the first time, households will be able to get the best broadband together with the UK’s best value mobile SIM, as part of a bundle perfectly tailored to the customer’s needs,” boasts Virgin COO Dana Strong.

Virgin Media is the only UK telco that can offer ‘quad play’ packages, which are popular on the continent but have not yet taken off in the UK. However there are signs that many of its rivals are adding new products to retain customers who will be less likely to defect if they receive more of their communications services from one provider.

BT has spent billions on securing premium sports TV rights for its BT Sport channels, which are offered to all of its broadband customers for free, in an effort to boost its television service and prevent users from defecting to Sky.

The former state monopoly is also believed to be preparing a consumer mobile network that will launch next year after it finalised an MVNO agreement with EE to complement the 2.5GHz spectrum it won in the Ofcom 4G auction last year.

This has worried Sky and Vodafone enough for the two to reportedly discuss a potential alliance, while EE itself offers fixed line superfast broadband with its LTE customers able to take advantage of significant discounts. TalkTalk also has its own TV platform and offers some mobile services to subscribers.

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