Sky phone line rental soars 18%
Sky is pushing up its monthly line rental costs and charges for daytime phone calls.
Sky is going to push up the price of its monthly line rental for all customers from £12.25 to £14.50 in December.
Sky will also reportedly increase the cost of daytime phone calls from 7.95p a minute to 8.41p. This will be Sky’s second phone charge increase this year, following hikes in September.
Anyone who signed up after 1st September is already on the higher charges.
The increase is so high that customers will be able to cancel their contracts early if they so wish.
Today’s news follows BT’s move last month to increase its line rental charges to £15.45 a month. However, it’s interesting to note that even after Sky’s latest increase, Sky will still be charging a lower line rental than BT.
How line rental charges compare
Here are the current standard line rental costs across the major players:
| Provider | Monthly line rental |
| Primus | £8.69 |
| Sky | £12.25 |
| Plusnet | £12.99 |
| Virgin Media | £13.90 |
| Talk Talk | £14.50 |
| BT | £14.60 |
And here's what they look like once BT and Sky increase their prices:
| Provider | Monthly line rental |
| Primus | £8.69 |
| Plusnet | £12.99 |
| Virgin Media | £13.90 |
| TalkTalk | £14.50 |
| Sky | £14.50 |
| BT | £15.45 |
Sky has paid a high price to continue broadcasting the majority of live TV Premier League football matches, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the TV and telecoms giant is looking to boost revenues in other parts of the business.
Still, such a large increase will be very frustrating for Sky customers, regardless of the reason.
If you want to make sure you’re getting the best deal on your phone and broadband charges, check out the different tariffs via our partner Broadband Choices.
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Comments
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Yep, got the letter too, BUT, after complaining to them by email and saying I'd transfer to BT as you can get 12 months line rental for £129 upfront, SKY offered me 12 months for £119 lump sum, saying it was 'always available on their website' - but the very honest lady talking to me said none of the staff even knew about it, so its well hidden. Anyway, just £10/month line rental until next November - result.
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@DonnyG thanks for the tip - so pleased that the favoured few are finding Infinity2 amazing. Some of us are paying twice the price and don't even get ADSL2! Infinity? that's the length of time we in the sticks (9 miles to the nearest town - is that really such a long way?) have to wait for anything approaching a fast broadband service, if they ever do actually get round to laying cable. Sickening. I check on BT site and basically it says 'NC' - not currently planned. Wait a minute, if I'm not happy, I can move! To - er - Talk Talk. Or Plusnet AKA BT. I might add, that when I did try to change to Plusnet (before I found it's owned by BT) I was told that my exchange was restricted and they could not offer me their special low price. So, I get a poorer service for a higher price just because of where I live. How can that be legal? Especially as they have invested zilch in the last 7 years in this area, which is the time I have lived here.
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@ Meldrewreborn interesting what you say about BT, I just moved house and the initial offer from BT was a 5 week leadtime to move my phone and broadband. After a stern email to Ian Livingston @ BT (look him up) I managed (eventually) to get my phone working a week earlier, my broadband however still took 5 weeks from date of order. BT blame it on a shortage of engineers due to all the extra work they've got due to the floods etc, and nothing to do with them (a) having too few engineers and (b) not a lot of competition. Basically, if you want a (non-cable) phone line no matter who your contract is with its a BT engineer that will install it. As for your comment about Maggie Thatcher, I'm afraid it's true, a few people are better off (shareholders and directors mainly) but for the majority its the same old excuses about wholesale price increases.. blah blah... and the government does nothing to regulate them. No wonder they can't get inflation down.
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18 October 2012