BT are putting the cost of line rental up by 50p per month starting October and telephone call costs are also due to rise,
The cost of BT’s line rental will now cost £13.29 per month or for those customers who pay by direct debit an dare e-billing customers it will cost £12.04 per month.
Daytime calls are also going to rise, with the price going up from 5.9p per minute to 6.4p per minute.
What could well be a co-incidence is that it was October that Labours “Broadband Tax” of 5op per month was due to be introduced, this was subsequently scrapped by the Conservative/Lib-Dem government. The broadband tax was due to help raise funds to help fund the roll out of next generation broadband across the country.
For anyone who doesn’t have a landline and is looking at taking one out and is willing to pay the landline fee as an annual subscription can make a big saving if they sign up before the 29th October, if they do they will be charged £113.88 (£9.49 per month) instead of the new price which will be £159.48 for the annual fee after October.
BT will be writing to all it’s 12.5 million customers to tell them about the price rises in the coming weeks, although it is thought that around half of BT’s customers are on the unlimited UK landline calls package and as such the call charges won’t affect these customers.
BT recently announced that they would be investing an extra £1 billion in deploying fibre optic broadband, making their total investment to be around £2.5 billion, they also recently started to offer Sky Sports channels to customers, however it is though that due to Sky changing the wholesale price of these channels that BT are actually going to be losing money on each one of these that they sell.