Price Hikes Pain for Virgin Media’s UK Broadband and Phone Customers
The on-going expansion of Virgin Media’s cable network, combined with rising data usage costs, new TV products and faster Internet speeds should perhaps reflect part of the reason why the operator has just revealed another round of annual price hikes, which will hit customers from 1st November 2016.
Customers should start to receive the related letters today and the average increase comes in at around +5.1%, although none of this should be a surprise. Virgin Media has tended to follow the same culture of annual increases as all of the other major providers, which started with BT a few months ago.
As usual the latest round of increases also bust way above the current level of inflation, but then that’s only part of the story (as per the first paragraph of our article).
Key Virgin Media Price Changes 2016/17
* Line Rental rising from £17.99 to £19 per month.
* Line Rental Saver will increase from £184 per year to £196 (equivalent to £16.33 per month).
* Broadband packages and bundles all rising by between around +£3-£4 extra per month.
Virgin has already increased prices for their TV add-ons, calls and mobile plans this year and as a result those aspects will remain unaffected by the latest announcement. Never the less this move is likely to cause frustration for existing subscribers, particularly as it occurs at a time when the economy appears to be suffering a blow from the recent Brexit vote.
Gregor McNeil, Virgin Media’s MD of Consumer, said:
“Customers are doing more online than ever before – data usage continues to grow by 60% every year. At Virgin Media our customers are getting more: faster broadband, an upgraded TV service including a greater choice of box sets and the only place where you can watch all the live footballing action from both Sky and BT Sport in a single package.
We do everything we can to keep prices competitive while striking the balance with investing in more of what our customers want.”
Ofcom’s guidelines for mid-contract price hikes, particularly those that run above the level of inflation, providers subscribers with 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 any of Virgin’s optional add-ons, only your primary service subscription. But remember that other ISPs will be imposing the same increases.
Alternatively you can always call Virgin Media and attempt to negotiate a price decrease and then leave if they fail to offer a suitable discount, which works for a lot of subscribers.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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got fed up with the price increases from these guys. seems every 6 months or so. Dumped
Popped my payg three sim in a 4g router to get a 50mbps service.
job done!!!!!
Every year find it harder and harder to stay a customer of Virgin’s, I used to have Virign Broadband in 4 different properties, now only have it in 1 and that wouldn’t be the case if I wasn’t held at ransom.
I’m very annoyed that BT have left just one exchange in the whole of Birmingham without Fibre and that had to be mine.
As I don’t use the connection (or even live in the house) it may be time to bin it off and just make the best of cheaper 3mb dsl.
You get what you pay for, the demand for data is going up and so will the broadband
Don’t believe them they want more money and nothing else, they are a business, they know they control the market so they want more money from the current members. I am living in ukraine – admin can verify the ip location of this message and the internet for 100mb is just 5gbp a month with a static ip address! And they do NOT control the bandwidth either… I have uploaded so much.. and they do not control the bandwidth… however i like how they want the money, you can pay them online while connected no need to setup direct debit or to telephone them. they suspend your account and then you can make the payment online via card or selected of local payment operators and get connected within 1 second 🙂
Still waiting for this broadband to be sorted out it is now three months and its still rubbish. Why don’t you get your act together and get it sorted. Download speeds are at a snails pace and you are charging me a packet for a rubbish service.
The article talks about “another round of annual price hikes” but I get 2 price rises every year, one in February and a second one in November. This year, each increase has been for £3.49 per month. That amounta to another £83.76 per year! Do VM think we have bottomless pockets? For my 70Mbs broadband service + Weekend Calls (no TV package) and paying £196 for Line Rental Saver, I will be paying the princely sum of £513.64. In my opinion this is nothing short of extortion.