2018 will start with Internet price increases for millions of families
Convergent rates (television, fixed internet and mobile) are increasingly common in households, but also increasingly expensive.
Consumers are already used to the incessant trickle of notices of increases in their Internet rates. But they are the so-called "convergent offers" that connect Internet, TV on demand and mobile lines that are suffering a constant increase in prices by the majority operators.
Three euros a month a month, another two euros a few months later, five months the following year and when the consumer starts looking at the bills he is paying hundreds of euros more per year than when he hired him. In return, operators boast of adding "more gigabytes" to mobile rates and increasing fiber connections to speeds that most of their customers will seldom take advantage of. "We will continue to provide more data to customers, and that has a price," said Laurent Paillassot, executive director of Vodafone Spain in May after the latest rate hike.
As of February 2018, Orange will announce a rate increase in its "Orange Love" offers (the former Orange Kangaroo) of five euros per line per month, 60 euros per year, for its customers. He does so after spending almost two years without increasing their rates, something very unusual in a market used to raise their bills every 9-12 months.
The most recent case, Movistar, announced a unilateral change to the increase in its rates. The overwhelming diversity of offers of the leading company by a number of users is difficult to limit even for the most experimenting consumer. From the "zero mergers" of 45 euros to the tariff "fusion plus 4 premium total" of 205 euros per month, the operator presents its customers with a staircase full of steps that even a monologist would find difficult to tell, at least without choke on. A prize to all telemarketers who can pronounce "Movistar fusion plus 4 premia extra" or "Movistar fusion plus total football" without getting stuck. Surely they do not earn enough.
After the elimination-absorption of operators that introduced some competition, we have returned to an oligopoly to three that harms the interests of the users "
These constant price increases do not seem to affect the operators as far as customers are concerned. In general, the hiring of these rates continues to grow, and portability bumps to other companies tend to last very little. Clients find little support in the scarce competition of the market since all the offers are very similar and even the price rises usually happen a few months apart. If Movistar raises prices in January, Orange do so in February and Vodafone will soon announce its own.
The "small" operators such as MásMóvil that Yoigo bought in the summer of 2016 to try to penetrate the convergent market have not yet penetrated deeply into the market. At the beginning of 2017, they had less than 200,000 broadband lines compared to Movistar's 6 million, Orange's 4 million and Vodafone's more than 3 million. Recent years have seen a decline in a market classified as fragmented by large teleoperators. Vodafone bought Ono to increase reach more customers and Orange responded by buying Jazztel.
