Massive EE Price Increase - Can I do anything?

GrubbyGirl_2

I got the Lebara deal through MSE at £1.75 for 6 months then £4.90 a month. Not had any problems at all in fact the signal here (via vodafone) has been better than the old O2 one where most of the time I had to use wifi calling at home

marlot

The annual rises at EE are outrageous.

I was happy to stick with them when the price rises were reasonable.

If you don't need some of the premium services (eg. 5G standalone) then move. My wife went to 1p Mobile, and I'm moving to Talk Home. Both use EE.

Stubod

I was with Plusnet, then got moved to EE…got ripped off, so moved to Lebera. Been with them 4 months now and not noticed any difference in service…

marlot

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82165425#Comment_82165425

I see two markets.

EE's offerings and pricing suggests they'd rather keep the high end customers - eg. those who want 5G standalone, or guaranteed reception when the network is busy. For those people, the annual £2.50 increase is a fairly modest portion of the overall bill. You aim to make as much from those customers as you can. And that probably means investing in some decent customer service staff, etc. You can charge a price premium if you get it right.

EE can then sell wholesale to the MVNOs. That's easy for EE. They lose all the low margin/customer headaches to someone else. The MVNOs have a different approach to making profit. They sell a smaller range of products, they drive customer service costs down (eg. customer self serve).

It is hard to have a customer service offering which caters for both the premium and mass market offerings. So segmentation is a sensible approach.

BT/EE used to do this by having Plusnet as the basic/value brand, but they seem to have forgotten why its there. Vodafone are still trying - they own Voxi - but I suspect Lebara are bigger than Voxi now?