Spectrum Has Increased Its Prices Again. Find Out How This Will Affect You
Did Spectrum raise their prices?
For the second time this year, Spectrum has increased the prices of its internet, TV, and home phone services.
Charter Communications (Spectrum’s parent company) has confirmed what a Reddit user claimed—that Spectrum quietly raised its rates across services starting in July. Charter has also closed three call centers in the past two months and laid off over 700 Spectrum employees.
Spectrum raising its prices is nothing new. Back in January, Spectrum implemented a round of price increases, including a bump in the price of its low-income internet plan, Spectrum Internet Assist, up from $20 to $25 monthly.
But with Spectrum price increases becoming more frequent, more and more Spectrum customers are jumping ship.
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How much of a price increase on my Spectrum Internet or TV plan should I expect?
You should expect your Spectrum Internet base price to increase by $3 monthly ($4 monthly for legacy plans), Spectrum Voice home phone plans by $3, and Spectrum TV Select by $3 in certain states. We are unsure which states, but Charter has asserted that the changes to its TV plans will only impact “less than 1%” of customers. Spectrum Mobile plans seem to be currently unaffected by these price changes.
Is Spectrum getting worse?
Charter is blaming the Spectrum price increases on a steady decline in customers. Charter’s public first-quarter earnings report details that the company lost over 70,000 Spectrum Internet customers and over 400,000 TV customers in the past three months.
In our annual Internet Customer Satisfaction Survey, Spectrum fared relatively well overall, earning a top-10 spot in general satisfaction. But when asked about an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) value, Spectrum was severely lacking, ranking 17th out of 25 total ISPs.
We predict a sharper decline in Spectrum’s rankings in next year’s survey. Plenty of internet and TV providers raise their prices yearly, but Spectrum doing so multiple times in one year is not a good look. Spectrum’s loss of over 70K internet customers in three months clearly indicates that many of its customers can no longer handle these price increases.
And with the ever-growing availability of better-performing, more reliable, and often cheaper fiber ISPs, we think that Spectrum and other large traditional cable internet providers will continue to see losses in their customer bases. Laying off call center workers isn’t going to help the customer experience, either, with a decreased number of representatives available to solve customer problems.
Not just Spectrum Internet is being affected by these changes. We used to tout Spectrum TV Select, Spectrum’s base TV plan, as the cheapest TV plan on the market. Over the past few months, the price has crept up by five dollars, then ten, and now another three, with no increases to its low channel count. These price hikes eliminated TV Select’s initial value and bumped our editorial opinion of the service way down.
It doesn’t surprise us that 400K Spectrum TV customers have canceled their service. Even with streaming prices going up along with internet and TV costs, many customers are still cutting the cord.
