BT to increase prices by 9 per cent for millions of UK customers
Affected users will pay an extra £42 annually on average for their phone and broadband bills
BT announced on Thursday that a price hike of more than 9 per cent would occur for most of its customers from the end of March.
The changes will affect millions of UK homes as the telecoms giant said that it is increasing prices to keep in line with latest inflation figures.
"Price rises are never popular, but are sometimes a necessary part of business, if we're to keep up with the rising costs we face," Nick Lane, BT's managing director for consumer customer services, wrote in a blog post.
He added that the price hike will ensure that the BT continues to "deliver a brilliant network experience as customers usage of data grows month on month".
In 2019, BT announced a change in the way it raised bills for customers. The company said that it would make only one change each year at the end of March that will see bills increased by 3.9 per cent plus inflation, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI) to reflect increasing costs to the business.
"We've thought long and hard about how we make sure that any pricing changes are predictable, clear, and not unfairly focussed on our existing customers, but reflected in our new prices too," Lane noted in his post.
This month inflation increased to 5.4 per cent, its highest level since March 1992.
BT says its broadband and phone bills will increase by 9.3 per cent from 31st March, meaning that the affected customers will now pay an extra £3.50 a month - or £42 annually - on average for their phone and broadband bills.
However, vulnerable customers, including those on the company's Home Essentials, Home Phone Saver and Basic plans, will not see an increase in prices, according to BT.
BT said the price hike is a "necessary part of business" as the company battles to keep up with surging costs of its own, following a major increase in bandwidth use driven by a surge in online education, work from home, online gaming and TV streaming services.
Data usage on BT's network has increased by 90 per cent since 2018, according to the company, while mobile phone usage has surged by 79 per cent since 2019.
BT competitors are also set to increase bills for customers.
Consumer group Which? said that TalkTalk is gearing up to increase bills for as many as 4 million customers by 9.1 per cent in April, while Vodafone's 940,000 broadband customers face a 9.3 per cent increase from the same month.
Virgin Media also announced earlier this month that it would increase prices for broadband customers from the beginning of March.
Price comparison site Uswitch said the hike would see millions of customers paying extra £56 per year on average to the company.
In May last year, BT reduced its fibre broadband prices for people receiving state benefits such as Universal Credit, with more than 4 million households able to apply for the package.
The move after a similar offer from Virgin Media, which launched its 15 Mbps Essential Broadband service in November 2020 to existing customers on Universal credit.