Virgin’s VIP SIM-only tariff now comes with a Plus

With Three about to increase the price of the SIM-only One Plan, rising to £20 per month on a 12-month contract, and £22 on a 30-day rolling contract, Virgin Media has announced an additional VIP tariff that could give Three a run for its money.

“Virgin Media was (of course) the first mobile operator to include 08 numbers in Pay Monthly allowances back in 2012, so this may not be such a huge surprise and with our VIP SIM becoming our best selling ever tariff, we wanted to take the pain out of calling 08 numbers for our ever growing contingent of SIM customers.

More people are getting to the end of their contract with a handset they love, but a tariff they want to shrink and with VIP Plus customers can get never before seen value for just £18 per month.

VIP Plus is available to buy now online, in store or over the phone and are available on standard, micro & nano SIM.”

Virgin Media

The new £18 per month VIP Plus tariff now offers unlimited calls to 0800, 0870, 0845, and 0808 numbers, which is in addition to the ordinary calls offered for free on the existing £15 per month VIP tariff.

That’s quite a big deal for anyone that has to call these numbers even only occasionally.

Both tariffs also include unlimited texts and data, although it’s here that you will find a slight catch.

Although nobody will find their data stops after heavy usage, anyone exceeding 3.5GB in any month will find a speed cap of 0.384Mbps kicks in instead.

To many this might be an unacceptable drop in speed, especially once Virgin users can take full advantage of EE’s 4G network.

But if making unlimited calls and texts is more important than truly unrestricted data, Virgin is offering a pretty good deal that can cater to a slightly different audience.

Given the seemingly unstoppable roll-out of 4G by EE, and 3.5GB still being a fairly generous allowance, a lot of people are going to be perfectly happy with Virgin’s VIP experience…