London ISP Community Fibre Notifies UK Customers of Price Rise
Network operator and UK ISP CommunityFibre, which has deployed a 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across a big chunk of London, has sadly just begun informing existing customers about a new round of annual price increases. The only good news is that their packages are still fairly competitive.
The operator, which also owns Box Broadband – a similar network that targets Surrey and West Sussex in England (here), has already rolled out their network to cover 1 million homes and 212,000 businesses in London by the end of July 2023 (we haven’t had any recent updates). CF were originally then aiming to reach 2.2m premises by the end of 2024, but that was before last year’s job cuts and build pause hit (here).
Unfortunately, CF also adopts a similar pricing policy to that of the major ISPs (except Sky Broadband), which means that “from 1st April every year we will increase the price of our services by up to the Government published Consumer Price Index (CPI) from January of the same year plus 2.9%” (most of the major providers add +3.9% to the CPI rate, rather than +2.9%). The published CPI rate in January was 4% (here), which means that CF’s average price increase will be 6.9%.
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The provider naturally blames the cost increase on the impact of rising inflation. But the good news is that Ofcom recently moved to ban mid-contract hikes that are linked to either inflation or percentage-based price rises (here), although this change won’t arrive in time to impact this year’s hikes – they’re expected to be introduced from late 2024.
Ofcom will instead require providers to tell customers precisely what any such hikes will be when they sign up (“in pounds and pence“), which rules out changes linked to unknown future inflation values or percentages. In theory, this should help to make future pricing clearer, although prices – at least among the biggest providers – will still rise (it won’t stop mid-contract hikes completely).
Copy of Community Fibre’s Customer Letter
(credits to GreenLantern22)
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The chances are fairly good that, given CF’s often faster and more affordable full fibre broadband packages, existing customers will probably opt to remain with the ISP rather than switch away. In fairness, CF has done a pretty good job of keeping their prices down over the past few years, although that started to change at the end of 2021, after they dropped their original promise of “NO mid-contract price hikes” (here).
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 X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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is Ofcom going to do they job and ban price increase during mid contract?
No, as per above.
Providing they say something like “Price: £4.50 per month, From april 1st 2025, it’ll be £99.99 per month, then april 1st 2026 it’ll be £199.99 per month, 36 month contract”
Would satisfy their rules.
What they *should* do – is ban in-contract price rises, we’ll start seeing shorter (but likely slightly more expensive) contracts then. This maybe is just phase 1 and they’ll do it in the future…
but this is ofcom, so doubt.
One would hope that once a provider has to make it abundantly clear, in the same size text, exactly what the price rises will be, people will start wising up to it and stop burying their head in the sand when buying things and claiming ignorance when the prices rise.
Which should mean demand for long contracts falls and shorted options are made available – but to be fair it’s really only in FTTP where 24 month contracts seem to be the only option in most cases now. There’s really no reason why they should be the only option, except the providers taking advantage of people who don’t properly understand what they’re signing up for.
What I find criminal also is that mobile networks get away with making claims of “no interest” on their phone plans, whilst making them significantly worse value than buying the phone outright with an equivalent SIM only plan. That is a practice that really does need to be banned!
That’s a bit of a jump 99 to 199
I am with AndyK. I hope the move to mid-contract price rises in pound and pence will make people less likely to purchase those contracts and might push ISPs to offer 12months fixed price contracts. Specially if it is a 24 months contract with two mid-contract price rises in April each year (say if you buy in Jan 2025, price rises in April 2025 and April 2026) that will make it harder for people to compare the average monthly cost of the plan over the full contract term. What OFCOM should do is to force the service providers to display clearly and prominently the average monthly cost of the plan over the contract term. That way it doesn’t really matter how many price rises or for what amount, you simply look for the plan with the cheapest average cost and it’s simple to compare. But that would be making sense of the rules, not something OFCOM is accustomed to. Uswitch already displays the “Average monthly cost” if you click on Price Details for each ISP option but they really need to make this a filter option. MoneySuperMarket allows to sort by it already. But I will expect them to adapt to the new rules and provide better filtering options.
If mid-contract rises are banned, prices will be higher. If contracts are shorter, prices will be higher.
Be careful what you wish for.
I just joined cf in December. And I’m 99% at the time the advert said no price rise for 2024, but will increase every April.
However I too got the email about price hike.
So I’m not sure if it’s for all as a generic email or not.
Same here (joined in Nov 23).
I joined in Feb 2024. Will I get a price increase??
Good news is that it looks like the £12.50 social tariff is exempt. I haven’t had any communication from them saying that it’s going up. Credit to CF where it’s due, the social offering is very good value and more than fast enough for most people.
CF’s investors want CF to break even. As part of the process,
CF has outsourced customer services to South Africa (Cape Town, and Durban), managed by CCI Enterprises DMCC (Jurisdiction Dubai, South Africa).
In March 2024, currently, 100 positions in the UK will be made redundant,but twenty positions will be available in the UK.
In the accounts year-ending 31/12/2022, CF had a turnover of £20m, and a loss
before tax, £50.4m. Highest paid director picked up £590k, which is a 25% increase versus 2021.
I signed up with them in December 22 for 2 years 500mb where the welcome email states
Price would go up by £2 in December 24 to £20.75 for out of contact price.
I have received the rise email above. Is this correct? Will I get two increases this year??
It’s not about the money as it is still cheap but I feel misled
Apart from the shoddy/messy wiring on the poles in my neck of the woods I am an otherwise satisfied customer
Anyone think this is false advertising or breach of contract?
Idiots crying about a £1 to £2 price rise!
Why do so many of their routers wind up on ebay? Perhaps they need to start charging for those.