What’s broadband provider loyalty costing you?

I have a similar dilemma to Carl Jackson except that I have Virgin fibre optic broadband. Their price increases are relentless and I have thought about moving but I am concerned about losing the use of my Virgin e-mail address (which I have had for donkey’s years). Changing it to another one and notifying everyone of the new address would be a daunting prospect. It is the sign-in for so many accounts and services and so many friends, relations and acquaintances would have to be told it would be a nightmare.

It’s a pain, but there is a way to reduce your costs with Virgin if you are out of contract.

There is a limit to what their retentions dept can offer you… but if you do start a switch to a different provider, and typically move your phone number at the same time… once Virgin receive the request to port your number to the new provider (and now know you are serious) they typically contact you and drop their prices considerably more.

I’ve recently done this – I took a contract with Sky (I took it out at Currys – they seem to have the best offers for sky, and some of the extra’s, such as extra SkyQ miniboxes, don’t register on their charges). sure enough, once Virgin received the porting request, they rang me and offered a significant discount… reducing prices for the same service from £105 mth to £64 mth – along with a £70 credit on my account.

I was within the cooling off period for Sky so simply cancelled my order, had my one-off costs refunded, and am now staying with Virgin.

As I say, its a bit of a pain, but as long as you wait for Virgin to call you (they won’t have the same deals if you call them) you can’t go wrong. Of course, I cannot guarantee this will happen, but it was recommended to me and has worked as expected.

One thing that would improve the marketplace greatly from the point of view of consumers would be the mandatory day each year that all ISPs would be required to provide Internet pricing in a similar format for the coming years.

So for instance
VM 1 yr £25 pm 2 yr £22pm 3 yr xxpm
BT ditto etc etc

The terms would apply from a start date say 6 mths hence to allow people to switch in anticipation.

You will appreciate that this is an auction system in reverse which gives greater power to the punters. It also will cut out one of businesses favourite weapons of blinding consumers with choices.

The lack of hassle for 3 years would be attractive to many and of course come with state-defined service levels and a standar contract with defined escape clauses.

The idea that BB is a utility and should be properly regulated must be more important than the right of businesses to buffalo and bemuse customers as in so many industries..

I joined Sky Broadband & Landline in 2015 after trying for months, and failing, to get BT to activate my landline on a newly built property. Sky had me up & running within 2 weeks, since then I have enjoyed good services and had my broadband updated to 40mbs over FTTC. My deal included free landline calls 24/7 for £33 per month, a good deal in my view.

Only yesterday (21st December) I ended up having quite a heated exchange with a BT salesperson because I was blatantly being lied to while trying to negotiate a new contract for the new Gfast fibre that has recently become available as our cabinet has just been upgraded.

A bit about my background with BT – We have been in our house for just over 20 years and had phone and broadband (dial up in the early days) and fastest fibre available since it was launched however many years ago that was now. We are only about 100m from the cabinet and up until recently have had a solid 72/19 Mbps connection.

For years I have hated their sales and pricing tactics, so to coin the phrase – “you have to play the game!”

I’ve always phoned up and haggled hard to get a good price at contract renewal time. The last twice I’ve had to resort to going through the pfaff of switching to Plusnet to get BT to send me their “we don’t want you to leave, please call us” email to then speak to their retentions team to negotiate the deal I wanted in the first place.

Their mid contract price increases really annoy me – in my mind a contract should be binding for the duration of that contract.

Around September time BT had its latest mid contract price increase, so on the phone again to negotiate back to their pre price increase price and we were happy and recontacted for the next 18 months.

My other distaste of BT’s (& all other ISP’s) sales practices is that over the last 5-7 years at least their levels of price increases have been way way above the level of inflation.

Roll forward a month and our cabinet gets upgraded to the Gfast Ultrafast fibre service. I’m interested in a bit more speed like everyone else.

As always I do my research online before picking the phone up to be aware of current advertised pricing.

Now I appreciate that Gfast is new and that there has had to have been some infrastructure investment to make it available, however the same applies to Virgin Media which unfortunately isn’t available in our area, but if it was they are currently offering their roughly 350 Mbps equivalent product for about £35 per month as a comparison (and those guys have had to dig up the road to get their service to you)

I look on BTs website before I make the call and the price for their Ultrafast 2 Plus (not interested in the “Plus” bit, but no option without it currently available) product is showing as £54:95 per month on the standard 18 months contract with £130 gift card cash back (my maths ability works that out to be worth approximately £7:22 per month price reduction) roughly bringing the bill down to £48 per month – still considerably more than the equivalent Virgin product.

So I make the call and get told as an existing customer they are prepared to offer me a special price of £59:95 which is supposedly a £5 reduction from the normal £64:95.

This is where the conversation started to get a little heated when I pointed out to the sales person that while I was talking to him I was looking at their website displaying the above described prices displayed for a new customer and as a loyal customer of over 20 years he was trying to tell me that as that loyal customer he was offering me a “Special” price that was in fact about £12 per month more than if I was a new customer. That would be an extra £216 during the 18 months contract.(£450 more than Virgin!) Some loyalty deal that was!

I put a deal on the table and said outright – if you can do this for £48 per month I’ll take out a new contract with you now. The chap put me on hold supposedly to discuss with his manager for what seemed like ages. I was about to hang up but he did come back to me only to tell me that his first offer was the only offer he could make me and also chipped in that my existing contract price was extremely cheap.

He didn’t like my response when I said no, I’m paying about the right price which is roughly in line with inflation and not your way above inflation inflated prices.

At that point I decided to politely end the conversation because I could see that I wasn’t going to make any sensible headway.

I’m not holding the salesperson personally responsible because I know that they have their hands tied working in a large organisation what they can do.

It’s BT’s terrible sales tactics that I despise and the rest of the ISPs for that matter as they are all the same.

Needless to say that I will be patient to get a reasonable deal and not a ripoff deal in the future.

I wonder what I am doing right? I constantly see TalkTalk down the ratings but having been with them from days of Tiscali and have had glitches (particularly in the early days) but generally I could not be more pleased.
We are on Faster Fibre and consistently get upper 30s down and upper 6s up.
£28.50 for the line and £7.50 for unlimited UK calls

https://press.which.co.uk/?s=broadband
”Get the message – Millions of broadband customers at risk of overpaying as new end-of-contract rules introduced
15 February 2020”

My current broadband and land line contract expires next month and I had it in my diary to renegotiate with the same provider – very desirable for me because my email address is with them and I do not want all the hassle changing it would bring. And I’ve been very content with their service. However, in line with the new rules they contacted me first and I was invited to renew my contract. In anticipation I was prepared to take the new customer rate – which I had negotiated last year although I was a long-established customer – but they, without prompting, offered me an 18 month contract 12% below that. Their “full” rate had no such negotiation occurred would have been 1.56 times what I was offered.

The process was simple. I am bothered by such large differences, though, in pricing but wonder how many people are actually charged the “full” amount.

I think negotiating prices is, in many cases, desirable in a commercial environment; I work on the principle that my current provider might want to retain me as a customer and is prepared to give me an incentive to stay, while they make a little bit less out of me.

However, the size of the disparity between offerings can be disturbing. But it is a (commercially) free country and, providing there is no monopoly, I have the same freedom to change provider.