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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

In the UK there's a company called Virgin Media (broadband, TV, phone provider) which has been completely blatant about it. They recently informed all customers that going forward they will annually be increasing prices by RPI + 3.9%.

https://www.virginmedia.com/mobile/annual-rpi-price-increase

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2023/01/virgin-mobile-...

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I jumped ship from them before Christmas. I'm with YouFiber now, I get symmetric gigabit for £35/m and £5/m for a static IPv4 address that opts me out of CGNAT. The first 3 months were free.

Vodafone did the same - CPI (10.5%) + 3.9% "to help support the continued investment in our network as we expand coverage". I guess 3.9% is some government limit?

Side note: if you are an O2 customer and a Virgin Media customer you can get your speed bumped up to the next tier for free

I could understand something smaller like RPI+1.5%

Ultimately I think the private sector pay has risen by about 4-5% annualised so maybe that's where they got that pricing.

Companies always prefer to offer sales and discounts rather than lower prices.

Same with antivirus companies who's model runs on let's hope they forgot renewal will be 10x the price!

This all relies on consumers not switching accounts constantly to the cheaper good-enough good.

rpi is 13%

and ee took CPI 10% + 3.5% profit.

I don't know how that's legal when you look at how the CPI is calculated and it included these companies already. They're adding onto their own adjusted price inflation.

The effect an individual company would have on CPI is negligible. Besides, CPI strongly underestimates the actual devaluation of currency. You can look up local newspaper prices from 10 years ago and today and compare that to newspapers index that goes into the CPI calculation and I'm almost sure the price difference would be significantly larger compared to that skewed statistic.

It's not individual companies though; in fact I think every telco includes that same RPI + {X}% increase in their contracts.

thats unbelievable. Diabolical.

That is the path to hyperinflation if more companies adopted something similar.

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