Broadband Yearly Price Increases?

SpellowHouse

SpellowHouse

SpellowHouse

Soldato
Joined
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I seem to be always posting about prices!

Today I was just casually looking at a variety of supplies and some of them have increases baked in to the contract.

Plusnet, for example, are £37.99 for a 900Mbps service. That sounds reasonable until you get to the final stage of information before buying it, where it suddenly tells you that's only the start price, because in March that rises to £40.99 and from Mar 2026 it again rises, this time to £43.99.

Are these yearly increases a thing now?

I am not actually interested in using Plusnet but I was just wondering whether this yearly increase thing has become the norm?
 
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Im with BT ( now EE ) and yes it goes up every year. This year was £3 a month extra on top of an already expensive bill and it wont be that long before its over £50 a month
 
dave28 said:
Im with BT ( now EE ) and yes it goes up every year. This year was £3 a month extra on top of an already expensive bill and it wont be that long before its over £50 a month
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That seems to be the same as Plusnet. They are working on £3 a year every year. I'm interested (in a bad way) to see what happens with my current supplier.
 
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I really make a point of refusing to enter those contracts. Fortunately hyperoptic are available in my area and do not do it. It's crazy how much that got normalized, but it must be so profitable because of the amount of people who do not care or understand.
 
SpellowHouse said:
Are these yearly increases a thing now?
I am not actually interested in using Plusnet but I was just wondering whether this yearly increase thing has become the norm?
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It always was a thing, just in the form of "price rises with inflation during contract", inflation was high so that annoyed people.
The change is they now have to tell you the rises in pounds up front.
 
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Ofcom said that if you're going to have yearly price increases then you have to tell people what these are in actual cash terms rather than saying it will be RPI plus a percentage.

My opinion on this all is that the entire point of a contract term is that you're guaranteeing income and a trade off is that you might have to suck it up if your costs increase during that time, and to an extent they still are because they're effectively predicting their costs are going up £3/month each year, but they have no way of knowing this. Also these aren't inflation rates if for example the monthly price is £35, £38 and then £41 but then signing up two years later the price is also £35 increasing by £3 a month each year - if it was inflation then the starting price in 2027 would be £41.

Just call it £38/month fixed for 24 months and bin the entire thing off. It's just being used as a way to get a low headline figure in for marketing, like when Sky would give you "free" broadband if you also had a £25 phone service with them.
 
SpellowHouse said:
I seem to be always posting about prices!

Today I was just casually looking at a variety of supplies and some of them have increases baked in to the contract.

Plusnet, for example, are £37.99 for a 900Mbps service. That sounds reasonable until you get to the final stage of information before buying it, where it suddenly tells you that's only the start price, because in March that rises to £40.99 and from Mar 2026 it again rises, this time to £43.99.

Are these yearly increases a thing now?

I am not actually interested in using Plusnet but I was just wondering whether this yearly increase thing has become the norm?
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It's not really anything new - they always used to increase the price every April. All that's changed is that they now have to tell you up front when/how much it will be going up by!

Absolutely agree though, either fix the price for the duration of the contract, or stop forcing you into a 2 year contract so they don't need to increase the price in the middle in the first place!
 
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It's all wrong.. you sign up at XXX and they tell you that after 12 months that it will be XXX + YYY... however the same service is still available for others at XXX.. but you can't get that price, because you have stayed with the same provider you are being punished, simple as.

Same with mobile phone providers..

This should be outlawed, if the same service is available at a cheaper price, then existing clients should be given/offered that at the end of any contract.

It's about time Ofcom grew a pair!
 
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Not a fan of the change either, I know prices have increased yearly for a while but now that they have to state it upfront they seem to have plucked basically 10% as the figure out of fresh air and it's locked in. So if we have low inflation the customer pays over the odds.

Contracts seem to have gone from 12 months to 2 years over the last decade to.

I want to sign up to some TV service as I'm moving house but the only one available is sky and I'm hesitant as it's two years and if sky stream in rubbish for me ( I keep reading it is compared to sky q) I'm locked in. I'm pretty much resigned that I won't and I'll just get broadband and change my viewing habits.

Off topic i know but they should look into exclusivity deals on sport to. F1 TV seems to be a superior product but not available here as sky has all the rights.
 
Yeah Aquiss don’t do this, I guess they may increase prices one day but at least they don’t make it a yearly occurrence.

✔Unlimited Monthly Usage
✔12 Month Contract
✔Static IPv4 Address
✔Static IPv6 Addresses
✔Standard Care

✔No Telephone Line Rental
✔No In-Contract Price Rises
✔No Annual CPI Increases
 
But why not just stop all the BS and ensure that you can't charge existing people more than new people for the same service.. equalise it all and it then becomes a level market with companies competing on price.. not relying on apathy..

they should also do this with TV services.. it's ridiculous that I have to call sky each year and threaten to leave before I can get a simliar price to a new subscriber.. criminal.. is what it is...
 
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If you regulate prices so that new customer offers go away then it's not going to lower the prices to that level, it's just going to make the new customer offers go away. Anybody posting in here who knows about new customer offers and retention deals and threatening to leave or even going as far as cancelling and waiting for a retentions call would be worse off in a situation where companies cannot make offers for new customers that are cheaper than the out-of-contract rates that existing customers pay.

And I understand it really, it's expensive to acquire new business. Giving people £10 a month off for a year is likely cheaper than any sort of widely targeted advertising campaign would be.
 
Caged said:
If you regulate prices so that new customer offers go away then it's not going to lower the prices to that level, it's just going to make the new customer offers go away. Anybody posting in here who knows about new customer offers and retention deals and threatening to leave or even going as far as cancelling and waiting for a retentions call would be worse off in a situation where companies cannot make offers for new customers that are cheaper than the out-of-contract rates that existing customers pay.

And I understand it really, it's expensive to acquire new business. Giving people £10 a month off for a year is likely cheaper than any sort of widely targeted advertising campaign would be.
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lol that's twisted.
If a company wants to keep or gain customers they should be offering the best price / service.
Imagine if another industry had different prices for new customers, 10% discount in tesco if you don't normally shop there, or 10% off nvidia if you have amd.
Usually the opposite is true - tesco force loyalty cards on people.
Existing customers don't want to be faffing about pretending to leave just to get a fair price, that's a symptom of the current pricing structure. Customers just want their service to continue at a fair price with good service, so they don't have to think about it, and don't have to worry that they'll get shafted for forgetting about it.
 
throwaway4372 said:
lol that's twisted.
If a company wants to keep or gain customers they should be offering the best price / service.
Imagine if another industry had different prices for new customers, 10% discount in tesco if you don't normally shop there, or 10% off nvidia if you have amd.
Usually the opposite is true - tesco force loyalty cards on people.
Existing customers don't want to be faffing about pretending to leave just to get a fair price, that's a symptom of the current pricing structure. Customers just want their service to continue at a fair price with good service, so they don't have to think about it, and don't have to worry that they'll get shafted for forgetting about it.
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this more than anything else, but until you force a stop to.. do nothing and rip off existing customers.. then the companies will not change..

it's BS that stop the new client / negotiation deals and we'll all be worse off.. that's what they want you to believe.. companies will still try to gain new customers with good deals which would also help existing customers..
 
throwaway4372 said:
lol that's twisted.
If a company wants to keep or gain customers they should be offering the best price / service.
Imagine if another industry had different prices for new customers, 10% discount in tesco if you don't normally shop there, or 10% off nvidia if you have amd.
Usually the opposite is true - tesco force loyalty cards on people.
Existing customers don't want to be faffing about pretending to leave just to get a fair price, that's a symptom of the current pricing structure. Customers just want their service to continue at a fair price with good service, so they don't have to think about it, and don't have to worry that they'll get shafted for forgetting about it.
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Yes in an ideal world, but we've seen people in this very forum complain that providers such as Aquiss seem expensive, that the six months half-price offer should be something they can get again if they re-contract after the initial 12 month term, so just being good is no guarantee that people won't still think they deserve something else.

The shareholders of ISPs would prefer to see a provider with a million customers lose 200k customers but gain 350k through new customer deals than see an ISP churn zero customers and 'only' gain 50k. I'm not disagreeing with you but that's how the world works, and my preference would be for Ofcom to focus on regulating service quality than endless fiddling with pricing. Ofcom decided long ago that their way to handle the UK ISP market for consumers was to make it really easy to switch between a billion different providers to get new customer promotions and send/return routers through the post each time that happened.
 
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throwaway4372 said:
Yea I just switched from BT to YouFibre and it was obvs bugging the YouFibre guy that they couldn't just use the OpenReach fibre, guy spends his days installing duplicate infrastructure. :(
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I remember one place I lived, a cable company rented the use of pipes from BT. But when the company wanted to expand their services to exceed that of BT's, BT told them they wouldn't allow it. So the company was forced to run new pipes to peoples houses for the entire town.
 
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