I can understand why there might be a cease charge or an Early Contract Termination charge as an ISP will have costs and charges they expect to recover over the length of a contract.
However I really don't like the Ofcom blessing (and encouragement?) of mid-contract price rises on 1st April each year. The best time to renew a contract is end of March/start of April when you get a year at the lower advertised price and only 1 annual increase.
The £4 increase is really disproportionate on a £24/£26 pound contract - all a game of smoke and mirrors.

There is a parliamentary petition to review/ban mid contract price increases if anyone is interested. Here ... I suppose if there is no annual price increase then contracts will more likely be for 12months (probably a good thing.)

The ofcom change was quite devious in my view.

I dont think they were stupid enough to misread the room, it was very clear people feel in contract rises are wrong.

Then they come out with this idea, the rises are not the issue, but rather its people bad at maths getting confused so the fix was to have the providers give us a fixed quote instead, that I found nonsensical and ofcom were clearly working with the providers to find a solution they were happy whilst giving the impression they regulating based on consumer feedback.

In reply to a post by Chrysalis:

The ofcom change was quite devious in my view.

I dont think they were stupid enough to misread the room, it was very clear people feel in contract rises are wrong.

Then they come out with this idea, the rises are not the issue, but rather its people bad at maths getting confused so the fix was to have the providers give us a fixed quote instead, that I found nonsensical and ofcom were clearly working with the providers to find a solution they were happy whilst giving the impression they regulating based on consumer feedback.

This ^^^^

I think that Ofcom are actually culpable for letting price rises get out of hand.

Ofcom made things needlessly complicated by laying out the method by which in-contract price rises should be managed, when the correct thing to do would have been to insist that you can't do them, and if you do it then people can exit.

How hard can it be for a consumer contract for 1-2 years to be written & agreed to by both sides that does not (in normal circumstances) require a price rise at all?

If there has to be one - then the answer is straightforward - CPI (based on a particular month... so say December CPI, raise in April). Not any formula like CPI+x, not using RPI. Use CPI.

Use of either CPI+ is inflationary, use of RPI is to use a deprecated statistic.

In reply to a post by hunnymonster:

How hard can it be for a consumer contract for 1-2 years to be written & agreed to by both sides that does not (in normal circumstances) require a price rise at all?

It's not hard -- but commercially most customers will prefer a lower initial monthly cost because they won't realise that there are price increases, therefore that pattern ends up more common. But there are plenty of ISPs (e.g. Zen) that offer more "traditional" contracts.

Let's face it, it's simply that OFCOM are incompetent and rarely act in the true interests of the consumer. They're an overpaid quango.

Same was anything run by govt, except the cynic in me thinks it's an agenda not incompetence

Edited by tommy45 (Thu 07-May-26 00:25:51)

I would be inclined towards incompetence. I think it is worth publicizing and signing the petition to the government to get this looked at again....

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/755642/

Thanks

Agreed & signed