Virgin Media UK Confirm Aim to Switch Virgin Mobile Plans to O2
Broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (VMO2) has today confirmed what we published yesterday (here), which is that, starting from March 2023, Virgin Mobile’s 3 million customers will begin being moved to O2’s own equivalent mobile plans with migrations taking place across 2023. The first customer letters about all this will go out next month.
The operator has also confirmed that all of their underlying mobile network traffic is now being run across the O2 network, with Virgin Mobile’s move away from Vodafone’s Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) platform being completed last year. This comes just a year and a half after Virgin Media and O2 merged in June 2021.
As part of this migration, Virgin Mobile’s customers can expect to receive unlimited texts and voice calls, and either double the data or “unlimited data” for the same amount each month – “no customers will see the cost of their plan rise as a result of this move,” said the operator (this of course doesn’t stop the usual annual price hikes from occurring).
The operator claims that the move will “occur seamlessly and over the air for the vast majority of customers with no need to replace SIMs, port phone numbers or change billing dates or information,” although it’s worth noting that the word “vast majority” is not the same as “all“. Historically, such big migrations do tend to throw up some problems when they occur.
Exact details of the changes and steps will be outlined to individual customers at least 30 days ahead of their migration taking place. Migrations will occur throughout the year, and “by the end of 2023 all existing and newly joined Virgin Mobile customers will have been moved to O2 plans.”
Gareth Turpin, Chief Commercial Officer at Virgin Media O2, said:
“This is a major milestone moment for Virgin Media O2 as our Virgin Mobile customers start moving over to O2 plans, receiving added value and benefits on top. Our teams will guide customers through every step of the migration, and we’re laser focused on making sure this all occurs in the most hassle-free way possible. With all of our mobile brands now powered by the award-winning O2 network, we are making fantastic progress in our integration plans while continuing to deliver a range of knockout mobile services that cater for all needs.”
The change itself began to be spotted a few days ago after several of Virgin Mobile’s product pages were updated to include the following notice: “Virgin Media and O2 have joined forces so, at some point soon, you’ll be moving from a Virgin Mobile plan to an equivalent O2 plan.” The move caused some surprise because it had originally been expected that the Virgin Mobile brand, which has a long and moderately successful history in the MVNO market, would be retained.
However, much as we suggested yesterday, this seems to indicate that VMO2 are learning from BT and EE’s challenges with their own merger. BT initially tried to maintain its own BT Mobile brand, but over the past few years they’ve walked this back and if you try to join BT Mobile today then the products are all from EE. In taking this action, VMO2 are similarly centralising mobile around O2’s branding, while still maintaining closely tied bundles (e.g. VOLT) with Virgin Media’s fixed line broadband, phone and TV products.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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They’re up to something, first time since being with Virgin Media they called to “upgrade my plan”. I already get a Gig 1 for about £50 a month, for that price they also want me to have a free SIM card, and TV box – saying no price rises for 18 months.
They were insistent on sending me a free “100gb sim”.
Very bizarre
Really looks like you’re being done. Nobody should be coughing up £600 a year. What’re you getting for that?
Please shop around!
@Alistair Webb, £50pm is cheaper than most for just gigabit broadband. With a 100gb sim and TV included it’s a good deal.
@Alistair
£50 for VM broadband at 1GB/s not 1GB of mobile data.
He’s being offered a free 100GB mobile SIM card.
Apols, Alistair,
Gig1 is the plan for gigabit broadband by Virgin, upon checking its £46/month, I’m not in an Openreach FTTP area, nor can Three reliably do 5G at high speed to the property.
VirginMedia called yesterday and offered to renew my contract (which isn’t actually up until July) with same package of broadband (1130Mbps), plus their new TV Box with ‘Mixit’ (I have no interest in), plus home phone with weekend calls (also no interest), plus a 100GB data allowance with unlimited calls and texts SIM for £53 a month.
It’s bizarre for them to even offer a deal, usually I have to cancel each year to even get the new customer price for broadband only. I assume it’s some sort of acquisition move to have more ‘TV’ and mobile customers. I’ve been with them for 10 years and they’re usually a hassle to renew with.
Must be a new strategy.
“saying no price rises for 18 months.”
i’ve had that before when the contract was up, when offered a deal i say “what about the annual price increase”, they imply what they are offering will stay that way for the contract duration. good job i make them write it in their notes when i accepted it, as it was conditional on accepting which makes it binding if both parties agree. as i had a cooling off period when taking out a new contract, i call within a few days to confirm it was noted about the price increase. as always, i got hit by the yearly price increase.. affecting all customers they say (only new customers got the protection of price increases for 18 months, not existing taking out a new contract). battle with retentions, they admit it was noted and they credited the difference to the end of the contract to what was agreed, after a few cycles of this i left.
Speculative – If the Virgin Media brand is strong then it seems a bit strange that they would move customers to o2.
I wonder if they will drop the licensing of the Virgin name and rebrand in a similar fashion to BT Consumer/EE.
This seems to relate to Virgin Mobile not Virgin Media (fixed line brand) so no indication they are dropping the Virgin brand at this stage. Virgin Media has much more brand equity in the broadband & TV space vs O2.
I can very much imagine they want to drop the Virgin name. They have to pay Richard Branson a very hefty sum to effectively rent the name from him. I suspect they’ll rebrand all of their TV and broadband as o2 in the future.
haha see what you can’t see – O2 TV 😀
They already have O2 TV in Germany, so nothing is impossible 😉
https://www.o2online.de/extras/o2-tv/
Really don’t see why anyone would voluntarily use o2! Their network is an absolute joke, hell it makes Three’s 4G look blindingly fast!
O2 is still the biggest mobile provider with 30m plus mobile users the network is bogged down by GiffGaff, Tesco, Sky customers. Telefonica in its haste to make money started letting anyone become a MVNO. The merger of VM o2, has already cost a lot of people their jobs, march last year VM got rid of 900 to BPO, the same at o2. A lot of tenured very knowledgeable agents left. So when you get retentions agents off shore that don’t offer a better deal. You now have your answer
Depends where you live, O2 is much better than 3 where I am.
As a long-standing Virgin Mobile customer, I only recently discovered I’d been moved over to the O2 Network which now explains the poor data speeds and patchy performance I’ve been experiencing for a while.
The highest 4G speeds I’ve seen during the day have been 2-3Mbps however I get around 20Mbps in the early hours of the morning, so the O2 network is clearly congested and can’t cope with the demand during the day.
A check for problems in my area on the O2 site reveals that “Our network can get busy in this area. This means your data could be slower than normal. We’re sorry about that. Our team is aware and working to make it better” but, unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be confined to my hometown. I traveled 20 miles away today and only managed 3-4Mbps on a speedtest. That just isn’t good enough for 4G.
I checked back through my texts and emails and I was never notified of the switchover. Having never previously had any issues when VM were using EE or Vodaphone, the move to O2 is a definite downgrade for me. Unfortunately, I’m only 6 months into a 12 month contract so I guess that means I can’t do anything about this for a while ?
Virgin Media has a 30 year licencing arrangement with Virgin Group to use the Virgin brand across the group of VM companies. It would make sense that they would want to slowly unwind this arrangement and transition to a brand where they didn’t have to pay those fees to Mr Branson et al.
VM and O2’s operations are still very separate internally, but they are slowly moving towards integration….the biggest challenge I gather will be the billing systems.
The biggest problem will be signal l am struggling to get a decent 4g signal in the bs39 area on o2 so how are they going to integrate virgin as well
It makes sense, the cost savings will be massive. Why spend all that money running the MVNO infrastructure (along with support contracts for various suppliers), employing all the staff etc when you can cancel all that by moving everyone to O2 directly.
You think three million customers are all going to be serviced by the same amount of O2 staff?
Of course not but they won’t need the same amount, you don’t need a lot of the management when the O2 ones can take over. Same goes for staff that manage various systems.
Speaking of O2 migration, I work at Tesco Mobile and we recently migrated our backend from O2 PAYG to O2 PAYM. It caused us so many issues!!
For example, allowances delinking from accounts. New tariffs not attaching correctly. Ports releasing but failing to attach on our end without O2 intervention. Unable to make outbound calls. Or unable to access data. SIM not connecting to 4G/5G anymore. Caller ID showing as “Unknown”. Suddenly losing data access on other numbers when upgrading contracts (because it forces account migration). And so on…
Expect Virgin Mobile’s migration to be even more messy. We only did a backend migration. But they’re doing migration AND a full system swap!
I was in the group meant to move across on 31 March and you’re right – it has been a mess. They didn’t transfer when they said they would, still haven’t sent my o2 log in details, despite saying they would, and their customer service staff haven’t got a clue.
I was transferred by VM to O2 as a result of a contract renewal. Later I found that whilst at my home address some important incoming calls were being terminated due to a mast problem in my area. On challenging O2 they advised the fix was high priority. 6 months later the fault had not been rectified so O2 agreed to terminate my mb contract. I switched to Plusnet who use EE and have maximum bars when at home. Be warned that moving suppler is not trouble free.
I’m switching my virgin mobile number to three uk via pac code as I despise virgin media and 02
Re getting better coverage on EE, ‘mileage may vary’. I can’t get a decent voice signal inside my house on Plusnet (EE), calls usually drop after a few minutes, annoying friends/family and making doing business v difficult. With Giffgaff (O2) voice signal is perfect. But I’m concerned data signal when out and about my be patchier with O2, currently I’ve got dual Sims – two cheap PAYG plans so I’m covered on both networks.
I had to conditionally switch from Virginmobile to O2 some months back after calling them to get a better price on my contract renewal with Virgin media. I have to say the mobile coverage was great with Virginmobile and is quite patchy with O2 so far. I will be leaving as soon as my contract is up. If it’s like this already it can only deteriorate as time goes by unless O2 make some big changes.
I wonder how this will affect ASDA mobile users.
It won’t they use Vodafone.
They are still signing up customers to Virgin Mobile, what’s the point of that given that it may cost money for the whole migration?? You would have thought they would have ended new sign ups last week of February. Perhaps they have had a change of mind?? I’m on Virgin Mobile and haven’t received any notice of this other than what was posted on both websites in early February.
Same here and I haven’t read anywhere else about people having received a letter yet. We have to wait and see.
I got an email a while ago saying I’d be moved across on 31 March. I got a text from them on 30 March saying it’s happen “overnight” and once it was done I’d get a text from them with my new o2 log in details. Needless to say, it didn’t happen overnight. When I asked virgin what was happening, they told me there had been problems and I’d be contacted with a new date. Then at 17:00 that day, my network started showing as o2. I’m still waiting for my o2 log in details. It’s been a mess.
I’ve just been in the first wave of customers moved from virgin to o2 (supposed to be 31 March) and thus far, it’s been a mess. They sent a text saying I’d be moved across “overnight”. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. I tweeted and DMd o2 on twitter to ask what was happening. No response. I went on the virgin forums and was told they had been “aware of issues” and that I’d be contacted and told a new date when I’d be moving. Then, at 17:00 that day, my signal started showing as o2 rather than virgin. I also got an email saying my o2 Direct Debit had been set up. In the original messages I got from them they said once that happened, I’d revive a welcome text to the o2 network which would give me my o2 username and password. Again, this has not happened. Typical mess.