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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

Also because just this year broadband companies raised the prices by inflation + several percents. I.e. my monthly bill increased by > 10 quid. And in the same time I'm in a contract (till the end of the year), so I can't even switch. It's not surprising that people cancel their contracts if they can.

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It's amazing that one-sided contracts like this (where you're committed to a term, but they're not committed to a price) don't violate consumer protection laws. What if they chose to double your monthly bill?

Annoyingly, I just got a new mobile contract as I was leaving BT and moved to EE.

I had agreed to a price of £x per month. After 2 weeks, I hadn't even had my first bill in, I got a letter saying the price was going up because of inflation...

2 weeks!

They can't. The contract generally says the price rise will be inflation plus a specified percent. Otherwise, eg if they raise call costs, they have to tell you that you can cancel penalty free - which I have done multiple times.

> inflation plus a specified percent

You sure? In NL it's just inflation, anything else means you have the option to cancel. Seems odd that they could specify an extra percentage in their terms of service just for the heck of it, not because of increased costs or so.

Though, in practice, you're with a carrier for a reason (either best quality or lowest price) and the competition also raised prices per inflation, or at least close enough that it doesn't tip the scale, so there's never a point cancelling a contract prematurely. Maximum contract duration is 2 years anyway iirc.

This one annoys me. Yes technically you're out of contract when they raise the price, but usually they only give you 30 days to move which isn't always enough to organise an alternative to avoid loss of service. They imply that the price is assured but it isn't at all and often they jack it up just months after taking out the so-called "contract". And the contract terms have been getting ever longer. The regulator needs to force advertised contract prices to be fixed for term.

That's not even really true any more - Ofcom (who are in charge of regulating telecoms here) decided that all the companies could increase their prices by inflation plus 3.9% every April without voiding people's contracts or allowing them to cancel and without having to account for this in the headline prices in all their advertisements, so naturally everyone did and ran lots of promotions based on the bogus prices right before the increase. I think they even let some companies do this when there was nothing at all in the contracts permitting it (though that may only have allowed increasing prices by inflation). There's also apparently a newer swizz where companies advertise discounted prices but calculate the price increase based on the original, non-discounted price. The whole thing stinks of regulatory capture and oligopolies and the British media and establishment doesn't seem to care. They're more interested in attacking actually-competitive sectors like supermarkets with tiny profit margins.

In the case of Virgin Media, they said each year it will increase by RPI plus 3.9%. It's ridiculous and I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish, cynically in thinking they're anticipating a vicious cycle of rising prices, people cancelling, so upping prices on whoever is left.

If you can, move to a 5G 30-day contract.

That's an industry standard as well

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