I feel lied to

I am a bit of a traditionalist at heart, at least as far as my household utility shopping habits are concerned. I generally feel that long-established companies are better to deal with than newfangled ones, because they have the experience and good procedures and so on, and they wouldn't have got away with things for 75 years if they hadn't.

This is possibly not a well-founded opinion, I freely admit, but it has kept me with my phone company (which we'll call TB) for almost 10 years now, on the grounds that, while they may have been a little more expensive than the competition, they at least had decent customer service and would do something if things went wrong, and also that generally there were no hidden do-das or unmentioned terms and conditions, and you knew what you were paying for.

However. A few weeks ago, I got a letter from them advertising their new Broadband deals, claiming that they start from 'as little as £4.99 a month'. Since I have been interested in getting Broadband at home (owing to no longer being able to freeload from work), I thought this really sounded quite good; they would be a reliable supplier and it would also have avoided having to get a man to come and rewire things and so on and so forth. But then I went online and investigated, and discovered that you have to sign up to a long contract (12 months, from memory), and that the £4.99 deal is only for the first 3 months, after which you have to pay something like £14.99 on top of your line rental. So actually, they do Broadband from as little as £14.99 a month, but give you a discount for the first 3 months, which is rather a different matter.

And now I feel like I have been lied to; if they had told me upfront that it was £14.99 a month, but that the first few months came at a reduced rate, I might have been interested (although it would still be too expensive), and even if I didn't take up the offer, I would have felt that they had given me all the pertinent facts; instead I now feel like they are a bunch of lying toe-rags, and I think I might change my telephone provider, just because.

So they should not have done that, and I hope they will learn from their mistake.