In-contract price upgrades are a massive bugbear of mine. I can't think of anywhere else where you sign up to an agreement, whereby the supplier is legally allowed to increase the cost by an unknown amount. I would never, ever, sign up to a contract like that in my professional life.
The fact that it's CPI/RPI + 3.9% which this year is going to be in the region of 14% is pretty grim too.
When networks first starting doing this it wasn't actually formally stated in the contract, as it is now, so I took it to CIFAS arbitration ... and lost. My case was that, by changing the terms of the contract, I had a right to withdrawal. This was especially true as they used RPI as the measure of inflation rather than CPI, which is generally a little bit lower. Even government departments had stopped using RPI as the 'true' measure of inflation by that point.
Boggles the mind that a 14 Pro 128GB, with a modest 25GB/month data allowance is £71/month today but would be around £87/month by the end of the contract, depending on inflation rates. And that brings to me to my final point. It's *somewhat* understandable that the carrier wants to charge you for increased the cost of their service, taking inflation into account. It's quite another thing to charge you RPI/CPI+3.9% for the portion of the contract that is actually paying for the phone. That's just a licence to print cash.
