Virgin Media has announced a new plan to help its customers stay online. The telecoms firm has revealed that, later this year, it will be offering a new broadband service at a much cheaper price to anyone receiving Universal Credit.
The new “Virgin Media Essential Broadband” service will cost £15 per month and offer speeds of around 15 Mbps which is fast enough to browse the web and stream content online.
Virgin says that this plan also comes with no fixed-term contract length and no price changes while benefit payments are being received.
That should give those whose finances have been hit by the current health crisis peace of mind that the cost won’t increase and they can cancel at any time.
“We know that these are tough times and that there are many people finding it more difficult to make ends meet and facing financial uncertainty, said Jeff Dodds, Chief Operating Officer at Virgin Media.
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“At the same time, the role of broadband in helping people to stay connected has never been clearer. Whether it’s keeping in touch with friends and family, finding advice and support or searching for jobs and working remotely – broadband underpins it all.
“With this all in mind, we wanted to make sure that those customers receiving benefit payments were able to access reliable, hassle-free connectivity with enough speed to carry out essential online activities.
“Building on the industry-leading initiatives we’ve already launched for vulnerable customers, we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep the country connected and support our customers in whatever way we can.”
This isn’t the first time that Virgin Media has announced measures to help overcome some of the obstacles that vulnerable customers can face in the marketplace.
The firm recently introducing annual package reviews, more flexible bill management through a specialist team and bespoke engineer visits.
In 2016, the provider introduced its Talk Protected phone-only plan.
This gave those customers over the age of 65 or those with additional accessibility needs a fixed-price home phone plan, with inclusive evening and weekend calls to UK landlines and mobiles alongside other benefits.
Virgin Media has also taken action during the Covid crisis to give customers the connectivity, data, entertainment and flexibility needed.
This included providing 10GB of mobile data at no extra cost; introducing more kids and entertainment programming; removing data caps on any broadband plans that still had them, and giving customers more flexibility over their services such as the ability to temporarily pause sports subscriptions when live events were suspended.