UK ISP BT to Raise Broadband, Phone and TV Prices from 2nd April 2017

The consumer division of BT has today announced that their retail broadband, phone and TV subscribers will soon be hit by yet another round of price rises from 2nd April 2017, which will result in some people paying several pounds extra per month.

The last major price rise announcement from BT was made on 29th April 2016, which became effective from 3rd July 2016 and resulted in customers paying an extra +£1 per month for standard line rental, as well as various increases to the cost of calling (here).

Since then all of the major ISPs have been forced to combine the cost of line rental and broadband (this occurred at the end of October 2016), which may also be impacting today’s announcement even though BT claims that the cost of phone line rental has been frozen at £18.99 per month.

The changes mean that the base price of BT’s standard copper line (up to 17Mbps ADSL) broadband packages will increase by +£2 per month, while their FTTC/P based superfast broadband BTInfinity services will go up by +£2.50 per month (typical increases of 5-6% across the bundle) and BT TV customers also have to pay +£3.50 a month for BTSport from 1st August 2017 (NOTE: BTSport for non-BT customers on Sky will see a +£1 rise).

Meanwhile those with an Anytime UK calls plan can expect to pay an extra +49p per month, while Evening and Weekend plans will go up by +30p. Elsewhere there’s also a +1p rise on the per minute cost of calling (i.e. outside of any free allowances), the call set-up fee will rise by +2p and most individual calling features will also increase by +25p.

John Petter, CEO of BT Consumer, said:

“Customers will get a better package and improved service from us this year in exchange for paying a little more. Millions will have the chance to upgrade to faster broadband and almost a million will be able to upgrade to enjoy unlimited usage for no extra cost.

As usual, we’ve taken care of low income customers by freezing the price of BT Basic and capping call costs. We’ve also frozen line rental, which will particularly help customers who only take a traditional phone service from us.”

The freeze on line rental is welcome, albeit somewhat of a moot point now that the cost of broadband and line rental is being combined by default (Ofcom are currently investigating line rental rises). Furthermore BT appears to be doing all of this much earlier in the year than we’ve come to expect. Before 2016 we’d normally see BT announcing their major hikes towards the middle or end of summer, but last year it became April and this year it’s January.

As for why BT’s prices are rising. One reason is because we’re all gobbling much more data than before and BT has to compensate for the flexibility of those “unlimited” usage allowances somewhere. The rate of inflation has also been rising over the past few months and recently hit 1.6% in December 2016, although BT can’t really use that as an excuse because it didn’t appear to have much impact on their historic increases.

However most of the largest ISPs are under pressure to adopt all sorts of new rules and regulations, such as the system for sending millions of warning emails (“subscriber alerts“) when Internet copyright infringement is detected (here), as well as moving customer support back to the UK (90% of BT’s customers’ calls will be answered in the UK and Ireland by Spring 2017), adding more premium TV / sport content and not to mention the new Internet snooping measures (here).

In today’s announcement BT has also pledged to reveal details of its new automatic compensation system for broadband / telecoms faults (expected to launch later in 2017), which is another big cost for ISPs to consider and Ofcom are proposing to implement this requirement industry-wide (here). None of these things are easy or cheap and sometimes the costs have to be passed on to end-users.

As usual Ofcom’s rule against mid-contract price hikes mean that today’s announcement may allow some customers to exit their contract penalty free (you need to do this within 30 days of the notification), but remember that other ISPs will be increasing their prices too.

UPDATE 2:46pm

BT also informs that customers who have BT Broadband and watch BTSport via their Sky satellite service will see an increase of £1.50 to £7.50 a month from 2nd April. Elsewhere BT TV prices (excluding BTSport) have been frozen.

The operator also reminded us that their new Call Protect service is now available free to BT customers to offer a defence against nuisance calls. This service can divert up to 30 million unwanted calls a week via the BT blacklist, customers’ own blacklists and the diverts they set up to deal with certain unwanted categories of calls, like international or withheld numbers.