[JonR]

I've just received the £50 letter myself. I think it's daft that they recently changed the box so it could handle 3Mb but are now saying that they need to change it again so it can handle 10Mb. After the idiot who changed the box last time didn't do it right and we had several days of no connection and a runaround with NTL's customer service, no one's going to change my box again - especially if I have to pay for the priviledge.

What's doubly-silly is that they're saying that the price will come down from £37.99 to £34.99. Why? That £3 per month difference works out to £36 per year. Why not leave the price at £37.99 for a year and upgrade all boxes for "free"? They'll still get their pound of flesh.

It's almost feels like a con. They wave around this £50 upgrade fee, hoping it'll discourage enough customers so that they'll be limited to 5Mb - but they'll be able to say it's the customer's "choice" and happily go on to advertise their 10Mb service all over the place. A pointer to this is that their webpage actually says "In general we would not recommend an upgrade...".

It reminds me of when the purportedly "free" upgrade to 3Mb came along. It was £34.99 per month but they upped the price to £37.99 two months before upgrading to 3Mb. That way they could happily say that the upgrade was "for free" when, of course, we were actually paying more.