And so the last of the big five mobile phone providers has followed the others by announcing a price rise for its existing pay monthly customers. From 28 February watch your O2 bills sneak up.

As many a Convo commenter will know, O2 is not alone in the price hike move. It was only last month that we ‘celebrated’ the first year anniversary of Orange announcing its price hike. Now O2 would like to join the party.

O2’s increasing its mobile line rental by 3.2% (current inflation rate) from 28 February 2013. You’ll only be affected if you’re on a pay monthly contract (pay-as-you-go customers are exempt), but this might make the hike harder to digest as most would think a contract comes at a fixed price.

It’s due to companies’ unfair price hikes and more than 2,000 comments that we launched our Fixed Means Fixed campaign calling for fixed to really mean fixed.

O2 price rise added to your mobile phone bill

O2 points out that for individuals, the price rise isn’t huge. For example, if you’re on its £31 a month tariff, you’ll see an increase of 99p a month or nearly £12 a year. Still, it’s the principle of the thing – fixed means fixed doesn’t it? Plus, we’ve worked out that collectively O2’s customers will pay almost £45m more a year on the back of this increase.

In many of our Conversations on mobile price rises, commenters have consistently pointed to O2 as being the only major provider not to increase its prices – and it has lasted some time despite others raising prices earlier this year. JayMusgraev gave O2 kudos for keeping its prices in check prior to the hike: ‘Seems that O2 could steal a march on their competitors’.

Until now O2 has publicly stated that it had no plans to put its prices up, indeed it has made a virtue of this. And yet, it had the same clause buried in its contract as all the other mobile providers. This clause says prices can go up every 12 months as long as this isn’t higher than the current RPI rate of inflation. We asked O2, along with the other providers, to remove this clause and they refused. Now we can see why.

Remove price rise terms from contracts

O2 says it’s giving you ‘maximum’ notice of the price rise by telling you by 17 December 2012 before implementing the rise on 28 February 2013. All current customers, whether you’re new to O2 or have been with the provider for a while, are affected. An O2 spokesperson told us:

‘Price increases are never welcome and this isn’t a decision we’ve taken lightly. At a time when our competitors have been raising the prices of their tariffs, we’ve resisted. But as external costs continue to rise, we can’t keep our pay monthly prices at the current level. For over half of our pay monthly customers this will mean an increase on their bill of up to 58 pence per month.’

This is why we need a change in the industry – these clauses need to be removed so that we know prices won’t go up when we sign on the dotted line. We hope Ofcom will act swiftly to ensure mobile phone companies are made to drop hidden clauses in their contracts that allow them to hit consumers with millions of pounds worth of unexpected price increases.