Broadband packages have a sting in the tail…
Citizens Advice is on the warpath against ISPs, accusing them of treating loyal customers unfairly because it isn’t clear that the cost of a broadband package can increase considerably once the initial discounted price expires.
You may well be aware that broadband providers generally have a cheap introductory offer on the cost of a subscription, but what Citizens Advice wants to highlight is that a considerable amount of folks don’t realise when the price of their connection goes up – and also that the extent of these increases can be very substantial.
According to new research from the charity, no less than 35% of broadband customers in the UK don’t realise that they face a price hike if they stay on the same plan with their ISP after the initial discount period ends.
Hence Citizens Advice says that customers remaining with the same provider are effectively having a ‘loyalty penalty’ exacted on them. And as mentioned, it’s a substantial fee.
According to the organisation, when the initial offer period expires, the average price rise of a broadband subscription is £113 per year. That’s almost £9.50 per month, and in percentage terms, an average increase of 43%.
Note that these figures weren’t calculated across all ISPs, but they’re an average of the cheapest basic broadband packages from the five biggest UK providers: BT, EE, Sky, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media. These are, of course, the plans that the majority of customers will be using.
The biggest offender, incidentally, was BT’s basic plan which carries an increase of 67% after the initial discount pricing runs out, leaving folks paying £16.50 per month more, or £198 over the course of a year.
So what should be done? Citizens Advice has called for ISPs to make it much clearer how much any particular package will cost after the fixed deal period ends, with upfront information provided in adverts, and in the details sent to subscribers when they sign up. As opposed to having these details hidden away in terms and conditions.
The charity also said that ISPs should text the consumer when the initial discount period ends, letting them know about the price increase which will be coming into play.
Citizens Advice also said that extra measures should be looked at for vulnerable customers, noting that older consumers (over 65) are more than twice as likely to have stayed with the same ISP for over a decade.
In a press statement, the charity said : “ Ofcom should define the vulnerable consumers who would be worst affected by broadband contract prices rises and explore ways to minimise the impact on them. One option could be to look at how a price cap, similar to the pre-payment meter cap in the energy market might work for broadband customers.”
In other gloomy broadband news we’ve seen recently, consumer watchdog Which observed that many broadband users in the UK are still struggling with poor connection speeds .

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Microsoft is pushing hard to dominate the modern smart home
The Raspberry Pi 3 just got even more useful with the Creators Update, as Cortana support has come to the version of Windows 10 tailored for IoT devices.
Windows 10 IoT Core now contains support for Cortana with the latest update which officially starts to roll out today, meaning that tinkerers will be able to use their Raspberry Pi 3 boards to build smart gadgets which are capable of accepting voice commands.
They need to run Microsoft’s OS on the device, of course, as opposed to Linux (such as Raspbian, the Debian-based operating system specifically optimized for the Raspberry Pi).
As PC World reports, the range of voice commands available to Raspberry Pi users will be similar to the way that the digital assistant works on the PC, and developers will be able to program various custom commands tied to whatever smart device they’re producing.
This is all part of Microsoft’s big push to get Cortana into the smart home, and really, into as many peoples’ lives as the firm can possibly manage.
With the Creators Update, Cortana is now supported not just on the Pi 3, but across a range of other mini-computers such as Intel’s Compute Sticks – and at the end of last year, Microsoft made it clear that the digital assistant would be coming to all Windows 10 IoT Core smart gadgets which have displays, from fridges to thermostats.
That has meant adding new capabilities such as ‘far-field voice’ support which allows Cortana to recognize commands from a distance – around four meters away – and pick those commands up even with the background noise and chatter you might have in a typical home.
This is all part of the battle lines which are currently being drawn between Cortana and other digital assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri.
But Microsoft is giving itself the best possible chance in making Cortana available not just across PCs, tablets, phones and its Xbox console, but also by maximizing the number of smart home devices that could potentially benefit from the integration of its voice assistant. Raspberry Pi support is certainly a big part of the latter puzzle.

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