As expected (or feared) Openreach (BT) has today announced a series of wholesale price increases for UK ISPs that use certain legacy copper line broadband, FTTC (VDSL2, G.fast, SOGEA) and phone products, which are intended to help the operator to afford their £12bn roll-out of 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.
The move follows the recent publication of Ofcom’s Wholesale Fixed Telecoms Market Review 2021-26 (summary), which among other changes saw the regulator move away from cost-based charge controls on copper line services. As part of that Openreach also gained the ability to spread the cost of investment in FTTP across a wider group of consumers (e.g. allowing them to recover some investment costs from both copper and fibre products).
It it likely now that any cost increases to your current ISP will be passed onto you if you are using the legacy copper broadband (which in our villages is a vast amount of us, except those utilising 4G broadband)
The kicker in all of this is we will end up paying more again for a product we are not likely ever to see from Openreach. Our rural broadband bills are higher than those with higher speeds in urban area's.
These additional price hikes do not form part of Gigaloch's deployment and their prices are fixed until 2025.
More on this article and any further updates can be found here https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/03/openreach-uk-raise-copper-line-prices-to-fuel-full-fibre-rollout.html