Just when I was starting to feel positive about Virgin.

(My net connection service is sorted. I was even beginning to feel a mite guilty – maybe the fault really was my raggedy cat5 – further damaged by the building work.)

An advert in the bus paper – the Metro – this morning compared the great cheap Virgin cable service – 10 MB broadband plus cable channels plus phone rental for £30- with the inferior Sky service.

The advert showed Sky with an impressive 80 MB or something- can’t remember the detail, sorry, but Virgin claimed it was capped and is slower the further you are from the hub (isn’t that true of all DSL anyway?) and costlier, at £36 plus £11 BT line rental.

Now, I was already a mite baffled, because surely it’s 10 Megabits not MB, which I am pretty sure usually means MegaBytes. Maybe it’s just how they put these things in ads, but as far as I can see, it’s exaggerating the speed by a factor of 8.

But I get home and open a letter from Virgin. It announces a 1 May price increase to £37 (though doubling the bandwidth, I am pleased to see) and an increase in phone charges. (Well, an exciting new way of calculating the phone charges, that sounds like a reduction – if you take some extra inclusive phone charge package – but slips in that they are rounding up to the nearest minute.)

So the price they are advertising today as being £6 a month lower than Sky’s package is actually going to be £1 more in a month. (And still minus Sky One.) Hmmm.