Millions of Virgin Media customers will soon see a price hike of up to £54 a year.
Most of the company’s UK cable customers will receive an increase of between £2.50 and £4.50 per month, the telecoms firm has revealed.
As more Britons turn to technology with another national lockdown underway, Virgin Media customers will see an average increase of £3.63 a month, equivalent to four per cent.
This is 13 times higher than the current consumer price inflation rate which stands at 0.3 per cent, as of November 2020.
Many Virgin Media customers are being contacted about a price hike as of March this year
The change will be effective from March 1 with broadband, TV and fixed line phone customers seeing changes in their bill that month.
However, vulnerable customers – including those on its new Essential broadband package for people receiving Universal Credit, as well as Talk Protected landline customers – will not see their prices change.
The telecoms company said it is currently writing to customers to explain these changes.
A Virgin Media spokesperson said: ‘Through continued investment, improvement and innovation we’re committed to providing great value and a top service for our customers.
‘Over the last year our customers have used their connectivity more than ever before, with data use increasing at the fastest rate we’ve ever seen.
‘Changing prices is never an easy decision, which is why, unlike other providers, this is our first cable price change in 18 months.
‘We are currently writing to cable customers to transparently communicate these changes and we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure we deliver for our customers and keep them connected at a time when it has never been more important.’
More households than ever are watching television and using the internet, thanks to lockdown
It added it had already invested more than £1billion in its network each year but to help meet this demand it does sometimes need to review its prices.
Over the last year, Virgin said it has supported its UK customers with a range of upgrades and new services at no extra cost.
This includes giving more than a million customers a free speed boost, upgrading millions of Hubs with faster WiFi and offering more customers the chance to get their hands on its V6 TV box.
It added that in the past year, thanks to the lockdown, data use on its network has increased by up to 95 per cent at certain times of the day.
Its customers have also downloaded an extra 2.8GB of data per day on average in 2020 – enough to watch nearly three hours of Netflix every day.
This is Money also contacted BT, Sky and TalkTalk to see if they, too, will be hiking their prices.
At the time of publication, none of the firms had responded.
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