BT will increase the price of its home phone line rental from April 28.
Brits will have to pay £13.59 a month - that's 30p up on the current charge of £13.29. Those signed up to electronic billing who pay their bill by direct debit will see line rental rise from £12.04 to £12.34.
Furthermore, the telecoms company revealed calls to UK landlines will increase by nine percent from 7p per minute to 7.6p per minute, and its Call Minder service, which ensures users can retrieve from another landline or mobile, anywhere in the world, will rise from £2.60 to £3 per month.
The increased rental charges will not be passed on to users of BT Basic or Line Rental Saver, while the call charge increases will not affect those on BT Basic or the company's Light User scheme.
In a letter sent to its customers, BT said it appreciated "that price rises are never welcome" but the impact would be "minimal".
In October last year, BT raised line rental by 50p a month and increased call charges by 10 percent.
"We are very disappointed that BT is raising the cost of its monthly line rental for the third time in the space of 12 months. Other suppliers will inevitably fall into BT's slip stream, as was demonstrated with repeated copycat price increases in 2010. This latest price increase will do little to ease the rising cost of living that UK consumers are currently facing," said Michael Phillips, product director at Broadbandchoices.co.uk.
Comments
Martin said: use VoIP instead No line rental unless of course you are stuck with ADSL and call rates are about 1pminute UK and cheap overseas as wellIt takes a bit of fiddling to get it set up - maybe use an AVM FritzBox combined wifiVoIP router to avoid firewall hasslesI use the Voip service from Draytelorg previously used Sipgate would recommend either Others available Whatever if you have broadband then really there is no excuse for putting up with BT call ratesIts about time PC Advisor said a bit more about VoIP