Adding insult to injury

Mar 29 2007

THOUSANDS of cable TV viewers lost their favourite Sky channels when Richard Branson's Virgin Media took over Telewest - and now The Stirrer can reveal that their phone bills will go up, too.

Virgin have decided to start "rounding up" call times, so that subscribers will be charged by the minute instead of by the second.

This means if you phone someone for four minutes and one second, you will be billed for a five minute call.

To compensate, Virgin are reducing their monthly charges by between £1.55 and £4.05, but the company admits that some customers will still end up paying more.

Subscribers to the company's standard tariff will lose out, along with those who make regular calls outside of the limits of their agreed package.

Virgin says: "Rounding up to the nearest minute is standard industry practice and something BT and Talk Talk introduced last year.

"Customers are able to switch to unlimited packages to protect themselves from call rounding."

There again, they could try to find a company that doesn't charge them for being on the phone even after they've hung up.