Wanting some advice. I have a deal for Now Broadband for £21 month. Received an email saying price will rise by £3.50 in July. However the email states that this will not affect any deal. I rang them to ask therefore whether the rise would apply to me and was told it would because it’s applied by the provider. My question is that the wording of the email appears to be splitting hairs in that what they are really saying is not that your deal price will be unaffected for the rest of the contract but the deal price is the same plus the £3.50 if that makes sense!
You need to look at your contract. We have an 18 month deal with Plusnet, who recently increased the price from £22.99 to £26.30, based on RPI plus 3%. Naively I’d thought the £22.99 was for the full 18 months, but I was wrong, and the RPI increase was there in the contract.
I think it is more the wording of email I’m referring to in that it could be inferred the deal price is honoured as is rather than the deal price plus the rise
Now is part of Sky by the way so yes a large company!
According to Money Saving Expert, you can leave penalty free, though all the packages seem very similar. Now and Plusnet seem to have some of the best satisfaction scores, which counts for a lot should things go wrong. I believe the Now increase is just an increase, rather than an annual RPI thing, so apologies if I’ve misled you.
To be fair I’ve found Now to be very good especially giving deals. I have Sky Sports as well which I believe is now £35 or 37 a month and without quibble offered me 12 months for £25. As said the Broadband was also a good deal so yes just have to suck up the rise and review in the future
All Broadband providers are permited to prodide for a mid term price rise in the contract, this practice was introduced in 2021.
It’s based on UK Consumer Price Index (CPI) rate of inflation.
The BT notification says … "When we work out our prices, we use the December CPI rate published in January. For December 2022, the CPI rate was 10.5%. This means that the majority of our customers will see a price increase of 14.4% (which is 10.5% plus 3.9%), or just over £1 per week for the average broadband customer These price changes take effect from 31 March 2023."
A side note on the subject: Ofcom has launched a review to examine if there is sufficient certainty and clarity in contracts about what customers can expect to pay. Bearing in mind Ofcom don’t set or regulate prices.
At least you can take some comfort from having competition in your broadband market. Here in the US it’s predominantly that cable companies hold monopolies in their regions and if you don’t like it you can always use dial up or crappy 3-4Mb DSL.
When I moved from Arizona five years ago I was paying $120 per month for an un-capped broadband (120Mb) connection. Now in North Carolina I pay just under $80 per month for a 220Mb connection which still feels like a bargain.
What does your deal offer you in terms of speeds/data allowance/throttling?
I’ve been with Zen for well over a decade, possibly two, ever since freeserve finished.
Their prices are not cheap (just over £40/month for unlimited/unthrottled which may be the norm these days) but I’ve always had great customer service and technical support well beyond anything I think I’d get from most of the more mainstream or competitive service providers.
I’m on FTTC and get a pretty much consistent ‘maximum’ for that of around 74 Mbps down and just under 20 Mbps up. If speeds drop it’s generally a bad ADSL filter or a fault outside my property which they investigate (or at least badger Openreach to do so).
Just been offered FTTP for around £50/month with protection from price rises such as the annual CPI+3.9% or whatever it is (the reason I ditched EE mobile broadband recently), but really unsure how practical it would be installation wise as my office where the existing ADSL terminates is far from where I assume the optical cable from the pole would terminate.
Could have sworn thte offer protected from price rises but will check.
You are protected from price rises for the duration of your contract term.
The original promise - which was one reason I chose them - was that your original price would stay unchanged as long as you stayed with Zen. I’ve still got that - provided I don’t move onto another plan with them. If I do then periodic rises will be the norm. Fortunately the relatively slow speeds I’m on (40/10 mbps) are sufficient.
Suspect I have the same - so long as I don’t change plan. Just checked and it’s no ‘in contract’ price rise for 18 months, not indefinite as on old products:
There seems to be a bit of marketing waffle there too - why would I need the 300 Mbps package for smooth video calls? Why would I need at least 500 Mbps package to connect ‘all my smart devices’, surely a function of the modem/router not the connection? ‘Future-proof full fibre’, fine until something better appear in ‘the future’.
What I find odd given higher speeds for less are generally likely for most going forwards as services improve, is why companies would want to risk customer churn by not keeping prices in line with the original contract price or even offering a reduction to keep you as if you were a new customer.
You really shouldn’t make such assumptions! They can terminate it wherever they are asked to, within reason. And after the termination, it’s Ethernet basically.
I suggest you ask them to come and survey it and tell you what they would do.
It’s certainly tempting to upgrade speeds, but my 80/20 ADSL is adequate for most things. Faster would certainly help with working from home as I handle pretty large datasets which generally need to be downloaded prior to manipulating them on the fly locally, the question is whether or not the work VPN which is already fairly saturated connection/bandwidth wise would be up to it!
The ADSL termination is potentially a bit unofficial - the old ‘phone line’ used to come through a rotting window frame to a ‘star’ configuration connection to phone extensions and the ‘main’ BT box downstairs. When the window was replaced the line/star connection was ripped out unceremoniously by a builder but was reconnected by a sub-contractor to the study on the other side of the house. Suspect Openreach would have a hissy fit if they needed to sort out any issues. I guess it’s a past consideration if I opted for FTTP as I’d likely get rid of the existing soon to be depreacted phone line/ADSL connection.
I don’t think they would actually. If it were too difficult then they would propose to bill you. Although dealing with Openreach can be a struggle, my experience of the actual technicians who come to sort things out is entirely positive.
I agree, ages ago there was a problem with a component in the ‘star connection’ box and I queried something with a technician up the pole working on someone else’s line - he chucked over a couple of components for me to ‘fix’ something that had been damaged by moisture from the rotting window frame. Those were the days of tweaking things to squeeze a Mbps or more out of old dodgy copper lines when you were lucky to be getting 5 Mbps or so.
That sets me thinking, why specify no ‘in contract’ price increase? Why not just ‘no price increase’? Makes me think there’s something specific about the words chosen.
