Anonymous

Frimley, Surrey

Engineer

I don't see how 'higher expectations' would explain Virgin Media's seemingly calculated decision to hike rates from £18 to £25 for users of the most basic 512k connection as a standalone service, without even notifying the customer. If you look at the Virgin Media website explaining these new prices, the bundle aspect of the new tariffs isn't even mentioned. Virgin Media simply assumes that you want TV and fries, when you only want Virgin broadband and to keep your BT line.

Let's say one fifth of Virgin's appoximately 4.9 million customers are using just a 512k connection alone.

This would mean that Virgin Media has made something like £7 million by automatically 'upgrading' 512k customers (incidentally without increasing the speed to 2MB) in just one month, knowing that most of these customers will not bother to challenge such a huge company and push for a refund.