Price Hikes Set to Hit Virgin Media Broadband and Phone Customers

Just like clockwork Virgin Media, which recently started boosting its cable broadband speeds up to 200Mbps (here), has this week announced a raft of major price hikes that will hit their new Internet and phone customers from 24th November 2015 and existing customers from 1st February 2016.

At this point most of the other major ISPs have already announced their annual broadband and phone price increases. By comparison Virgin Media tends to follow a few short months later and introduce their changes for existing subscribers during the New Year.

Mind you this year the level of consumer inflation has remained fairly flat at around 0% and yet all of the ISPs have so far continued to deliver inflation busting increases (usually around +5-6%), with Virgin Media being no exception (Ofcom has taken notice of this). So what’s changing?

Summary of Key Virgin Media Price Changes

* Virgin Phone Line Rental will increase by +£1 (from £16.99 to £17.99 per month).

* Virgin Line Rental Saver will increase from £164 per year to £184 (equivalent to £15.33 per month).

* Virgin’s various broadband and phone bundles will all rise by between £3.49 and £3.99 per month.

* Existing broadband-only customers whose prices have already increased are unaffected (here).

In fairness such increases aren’t all about catering for moving aspects like inflation. Indeed Virgin and other ISPs would no doubt state that the ever rising data consumption of their customers, as well as the recent speed upgrades, growing WiFi footprint and of course their Project Lighting network expansion to 17 million premises by 2020 (60-65% UK coverage) can all play a part.

Gregor McNeil, Virgin Media’s Consumer MD, said:

“We are doing everything we can to keep prices as competitive as possible. Through the continuing investment in our network we are again upgrading our customers’ broadband speeds and providing unlimited downloads – meeting the growth in data consumption we see. Our customers want to do more online, so we are always making sure that our customers get more for the prices they pay.”

As usual Ofcom’s guidelines for mid-contract price hikes, particularly those that run above the level of inflation (most such increases usually do), gives subscribers the option to exit their contract penalty free within 30 days of receiving the price notification letter. Take note that this does not apply to their Virgin Mobile service as those are optional add-ons and not affected by the above increases.