Re: Inflation rises are an inevitable necessity.
Exactly! They're the ones that keep extending the terms of their "contracts". 20 years ago many of the best ISPs offered monthly rolling contracts priced on bandwidth and data usage and following the switch to broadband the early increases in speed from 0.5 to 2Mbps were passed-on to the customers at no extra cost but then we had the "up to 8Mbps" followed by "unlimited downloads" marketing nonsense with undeclared traffic-shaping/throttling which OFCOM did sod all about.
Around this time many ISPs were bought/sold out and monthly rolling contracts started to become expensive and disappeared from most ISPs offerings leaving mainly 12 month contracts. Then some new ISPs offered "genuine unlimited" and hoovered up new customers so the other ISPs upgraded and started to follow but contracts started getting longer at 18 months with false special deals that they called discounts on your bill so that when your contract term ends they drop the discount and start charging you £5-£15 more per month than what they're offering exclusively to new customers (at or before this point I usually switched ISP and/or wasted 30+ minutes on the phone negotiating another deal)
Before most urban areas started to achieve 8Mbps we started receiving offers to upgrade to FTTC or "standard fibre" with continued "up to" marketing nonsense. I ignored that half-arsed fibre tosh and waited for FTTP or "full fibre" to become available. By this time my standard broadband was achieving 12Mbps which was more than adequate for streaming 4K TV and sofa-surfing on a mobile. I received weekly calls from my ISP trying to persuade me to pay an extra £5-£10 a month for a faster connection I didn't need. "But it's much faster", they kept telling me. "But I don't need it. There's only me in the house!" I would reply. I nearly switched once when the monthly prices started to match, until I was told I would lose my house phone.
Finally, last autumn I was forced to upgrade to FFTP with a VOIP enabled router for my house phone. Despite the notification email saying there would be no change to my contract, 2 days later I received emails telling me I was on a new more expensive contract. After some online chat with the ISP/Telecon, rather than switch, I negotiated another discount on a 24 month fixed-term contract that will obviously have an April price rise! I still paid extra for the consortium of BT/Open reach/Talk Talk to upgrade their obsolete kit and 50 year old wiring that until a few years ago OFCOM allowed them to charge £12.99 line rental for before they absorbed/hid the cost. Top job OFCOM!