Cable giant Virgin Media has launched a new promotion offering 6 months half price on its dual and triple-play broadband bundles that include a Virgin Home Phone line and or TV service. In addition, Virgin are also offering a FREE Installation and FREE Activation on the same bundles containing 10Mb, 20Mb or 50Mb broadband speed connections.

As a result of the new offers, the cheapest dual play (broadband and phone) bundles now start at just £6.25 per month (first 6 months) with a 10Mbps (L) "Unlimited" (Traffic Management) broadband connection, rising to £12.75 thereafter. This also means that the 50Mbps service will now start at just £12.50 per month, before returning to £25 after 6 months.

Prices for a triple play bundle start at £9.50 per month (£19.25 thereafter) for a Size L broadband (10Mbps, "unlimited" downloads), Size M+ TV (65 digital TV channels) and Size M phone (unlimited weekend UK landline calls) package.

Sadly it's not all good news as Virgin have also increased their line rental charges from £11.99 to £12.24 per month and, worst of all, lengthened their special offer contracts from 12 to 18 months :sad: . It's disappointing to see Virgin, on the back of their successful 100Mbps product launch last week (here), following BT and TalkTalk into the territory of extremely long contracts.

UPDATE 07:14am

Take note that Virgin Media has not yet updated its website and are, at the time of writing, still showing their October deals (due to expire on 31st, yesterday).

UPDATE 1:27pm

Virgin has kindly clarified that the line rental prices are not due to take effect until January 2011 when the rate of VAT is set to rise, which is the reason for their adjustment.

This was not mentioned in the details we received, which said: "From 1st November line rental charges will be increased from £11.99 to £12.24".

Elsewhere Virgin have still not updated their website with the new deals above, which suggests that it will occur later today or early tomorrow morning as several other deals won't expire until 1st November.