@Steve721: They do send reminder letters. I've just had mine, about 2 weeks before my current contract comes to an end.
I'm currently paying £43pcm for 350Mbps service and after the contract discounts end (which I had to haggle and threaten to leave 18 months ago to get), they want to put it up to £61pcm!!! If I wanted to try to get the price back down, I'd have to haggle and threaten to leave again, as I have done every 18 months for years.
The reason that I ended up staying before was that no-one else provided a service better than 70Mbps in my area. VM had a monopoly on very fast broadband. But now that is changing...
Competitors are moving in and in my area now I can now get a symmetrical 1Gbps service (same speed up and down) for £26pcm on a 24 month contract. That difference is just too big to ignore.
So, after almost 25 years I will be leaving VM...
Trying to charge me £61pcm out of contract for 350Mbps when I can now get a service 3x faster for just over one third of the price is frankly insulting, as is the need to threaten to leave every time to get any kind of better price. VM is, in effect, saying to its customers "If you are stupid enough to pay our inflated prices because you don't know any better, then we are happy to let you".
When I phoned and gave notice to cancel my VM service, their retentions people subsequently called me three times trying to offer a better price, eventually offering to cut the quoted out-of-contract price in half! Nice, but too late - and in any case, I was fed up with a company that treats its customers this way.
So, my advice would be to check out the competition in your area, especially the newcomers in the market who can almost certainly offer a much better service at a much lower price.
In a way, I'm kinda sad to be leaving after nearly 25 years, but common sense and my household budget made it impossible to stay. I doubt I'm the only person now reaching this conclusion.
