Telenet or Proximus: which TV subscription to choose?

Between Telenet and Proximus, price comes second. The first question is which of the two runs down your street — and for most French-speaking households settled in Flanders or on the edge of Brussels, it is settled in five minutes. Here is the full head-to-head, judged on the post-promotion price and on what you actually receive.

Telenet or Proximus: which one actually covers your address?

Proximus almost everywhere, Telenet only where the cable runs.

Proximus operates its own network across the whole Belgian territory: copper everywhere, fibre in a growing number of municipalities. Telenet is a cable operator. Its network covers Flanders, the Brussels-Capital Region, and part of the provinces of Hainaut and Namur — the latter inherited from the SFR BeLux acquisition. The coaxial cable in those municipalities now belongs to infrastructure company Wyre, which also handles the fibre roll-out there.

In other words: in Vilvoorde, Halle or Grimbergen, the head-to-head takes place. In Liège, Charleroi or Arlon it does not take place at all, and your choice runs between Proximus, Orange and VOO.

I spent seven years installing set-top boxes around Namur, for an integrator who installed for three different operators in the same streets. What I saw most often was not the absence of a network: it was the gap between the map and the house number. Two parallel streets could depend on two different networks, and the commercial map did not show it. I made wasted call-outs on connections sold as available.

How much does the bundle cost after the promotion with each of them?

Around 71 EUR/month with Telenet, 75.99 EUR/month with Proximus, for internet + TV with no options. Here is the full grid, surveyed on 18 August 2026 on both operators' public tariff pages.

Five euros a month apart, so about sixty euros over a year. That is not where the decision is made, and it is precisely what the comparison sites on Google's first page leave out: they line up first-year promotional prices without saying how many months the promotion lasts.

And it does not last twelve months everywhere. The Proximus promotion opened on 17 August 2026 and valid until 30 September 2026 covers three months, not a year: a discount on internet, 18 EUR a month on TV and 15 EUR a month on mobile, then back to the full price in month four. On the Telenet side, the 21 EUR monthly discount on Internet Basic — 35 EUR instead of 56 EUR — ran for six months and its subscription window closed on 16 August 2026.

A three-month promotion on a contract you keep for four years is not a discount: it is a welcome gift.

The calculation that matters fits on one line. Over thirty-six months at the post-promotion price, Telenet internet + TV comes to around 2,556 EUR, a Proximus Flex+ to 2,735 EUR. One hundred and eighty euros apart over three years — provided Telenet serves your address, and provided you do not need a fixed line.

Which set-top box records the most hours of programmes?

The Telenet one, and the gap is twofold.

The Telenet TV Box stores up to 200 hours of recordings in the cloud. With Proximus, the Pickx box includes 100, with an extension to 300 hours billed at 3 EUR a month — 36 EUR a year for storage space. If you record little, the 100 hours from Proximus are ample. If you archive whole series, Telenet starts with twice the room at no extra charge.

Retention length tells another story. With Telenet you choose for each recording: one week, one month, two months or twelve months. With Proximus the default is 60 days, with an extension to a maximum of one year requested when you schedule the recording — not afterwards. And since 11 June 2024, owners of the older Proximus boxes have lost the ability to keep a recording for up to three years, a function that had existed since the service began.

When I was installing boxes, the recording question always came at the end of the appointment, once the screen was on. The customer asked where their old recordings went. Answer: nowhere, they do not transfer from one operator to another, nor even from one box to another with the same operator. It is the one item of a telecom move that is lost in full.

How many channels do you really receive at your address?

80 in Flanders, 124 in Brussels — for the same TV Iconic subscription, at the same price.

That is the most telling figure in this head-to-head, and Telenet does not hide it: the number of channels in its package depends on the connection region, because carriage rights are negotiated network by network and area by area. A French-speaking Brussels resident receives 44 more channels than a Flemish subscriber paying exactly the same. With Proximus, the base package sits around 80 channels, with its own variations by municipality.

One detail that muddles the reading of TV Iconic pricing: the price is not single either. Counted as an add-on to a Telenet internet subscription, TV Iconic shows up at 15 EUR a month. On the residential price list, the same TV Iconic sold as digital television alone on the cable is listed at around 27.87 EUR a month. Both figures circulate, they do not describe the same thing, and neither page says so plainly. On an item you will pay every month for three years, I would like the amount to be the same everywhere.

With Proximus the question does not arise in the same terms: TV is not sold on its own at all. It necessarily runs through a bundle with internet, as it does with Telenet, Orange and Scarlet. In Belgium, only TéléSAT and BASE still market a standalone TV subscription.

What does the end of the ONE bundles change at Telenet?

It makes a line-by-line comparison impossible, and that is not a presentation detail.

Telenet has ended its ONE and ONEup combined offers. Customers now build their own subscription, starting from internet: Internet Basic at 56 EUR, Standard at 65 EUR, Turbo at 85 EUR, then TV Iconic, then mobile. The fixed line, which was included in the ONE bundles, becomes a separate paid item. A tariff adjustment of around 2 percent on average applied on 16 March 2026 to fixed internet, digital TV, mobile and telephony subscriptions.

The practical consequence: the "Telenet trio bundle" you will still see quoted on comparison sites at 53 or 70 EUR a month describes an offer no longer sold as such. Against the Proximus trio at 90.99 EUR, the only honest comparison is to add up the equivalent Telenet bricks yourself — internet, TV, mobile, fixed line — and then compare the two post-promotion totals.

How do you move from one to the other without double billing?

Through Easy Switch, and above all not by cancelling yourself.

The principle: you sign with the new operator, hand over your Easy Switch number — it appears on your bill — and they organise the cancellation of the old contract and the handover. Downtime is in principle reduced to a few hours on switchover day.

The trap I saw most often on installations was always the same: the customer cancelled on their own side, the new connection took three weeks, and they ended up without television or billed twice. Three weeks of double billing is about fifty euros lost to a form filled in the wrong order.

Two more points to watch. Return the old operator's equipment within the stated deadline, box and delivery note included: the charges that survive a cancellation almost always concern unreturned equipment. And check that your options — sport, extra channels — are cancelled separately, because they run month by month and do not always follow the main contract.

On commitment length, Belgian law is on your side with both: a telecoms contract is committed for six months at most, and the BIPT regularly points it out. Beyond that you leave with no break fee.

For the full picture of all six Belgian operators, see the TV subscription ranking or go straight to the comparator. And if your address is in Wallonia, the useful head-to-head is not this one but Proximus or VOO, which covers the same tariffs, bundle by bundle.

Sources — public tariff pages from Telenet (internet subscriptions, TV Iconic, residential price list) and Proximus (Flex+ bundles, promotion conditions from 17/08 to 30/09/2026), surveyed on 18 August 2026; Proximus entry-level trio surveyed on 16 August 2026; Telenet tariff adjustment of 16 March 2026; removal of the three-year recording extension at Proximus, 11 June 2024; Telenet press release on the SFR BeLux acquisition and the Wyre network.