ISP Vodafone UK Set to Increase Home Fibre Broadband Prices

Mobile operator and ISP Vodafone UK has started to inform their existing customers that the standard price of their fixed line home broadband packages will be increasing from December 2019, with the underlying monthly cost being set to rise by £2.50 extra per month.

At present Vodafone is home to over 600,000 fixed line broadband customers and the vast majority take a service via their Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (VDSL2) based Superfast 1 (35Mbps) or Superfast 2 (63Mbps) packages, which are priced from £20 and £25 per month respectively for existing mobile customers (£22 and £27 if you’re not a Vodafone Mobile customer).

An increase of £2.50 would thus represent quite a significant hike of around 9-11%. Indeed it may even make it difficult for them to retain their position as one of the market’s cheapest nationally available superfast broadband providers.

On the upside this change will only affect those who took out a package before 30th June 2019. Meanwhile, for more established existing customers, the provider is promising that they can continued to pay the same monthly price as they do today, but only if they agree to re-contract for another full 18 month term.

A Vodafone Spokesperson said:

“To ensure that we can keep delivering the best service to our customers, we are increasing the price of our home broadband packages by a small amount to customers who took out a contract before 30th June 2019. Unlike our competitors we haven’t increased our in-contract home broadband prices since 2017 – we will still offer the best value broadband service on the market.

Customers will be notified 30 days prior to the change in price plan and we are in the process of contacting them now. Those who opt to renew their home broadband contract will continue to pay the same monthly price as they are now.

We continue to invest in our home broadband service. For example, we have recently introduced Vodafone’s Home Broadband App that lets you pause Wi-Fi and boost or prioritise speeds to devices. Plus, we offer our Ultimate Broadband Guarantee – the only guarantee in the industry that promises a minimum sync speed to your router or money off until its fixed. This investment has resulted in Vodafone being named the Best Value Broadband Provider by u Switch. We are also the fastest growing home broadband provider in the UK.

The price of Home Broadband packages will be increasing by £2.50 a month. For example, a customer on Vodafone Superfast 1 who is currently paying £20 a month would end up paying £22.50.”

Price rises are never popular, although they’re quite a common annual event amongst all of the market’s largest ISPs, not least because they’re frequently adding all sorts of new services, developing new systems and consumers are also gobbling significantly more data with each passing year. The fact that Vodafone are also one of the very cheapest, even with such an increase, could make it harder to find an alternative.

On top of that the big ISPs are also under pressure to adopt all sorts of new rules, such as having to cater for the hugely expensive new system of automatic compensation (here), as well as Ofcom’s revised broadband speed code of practice (here) and new fairness rules.

Naturally those who aren’t happy can always try a bit of haggling (Retentions – Tips for Cutting Your Broadband Bill) and anybody stuck in-contract should be able to exit penalty free (provided you tell them within 30 days of receiving the notice). In fairness we like the fact that Vodafone are giving existing customers the option to re-contract at the same price (easier than haggling), not many ISPs do that.

UPDATE 23rd October 2019 – 7am:

Added the full statement from Vodafone above. We also note that overnight the pricing on their two superfast packages has adopted a new discount level. Confusingly both Superfast 1 and 2 are now at the same price of £21 per month for existing mobile customers and £23 for non-mobile customers.

We’ve also had it confirmed that the price increase won’t affect their FTTH Gigafast packages.