Britain's two other largest internet service providers - AOL and BTopenworld - yesterday raised their unmetered internet access prices by £1 per month, following a Freeserve price hike in March.

AOL's Flat Rate service and BTopenworld's Anytime package will cost £15.99 a month from May. Last month Freeserve raised the price of its Anytime unmetered access service by £1 to £13.99 a month.

The price rises were not unexpected. In January, the chief executive of Freeserve, John Pluthero, warned that he "would be surprised if there weren't price rises from a lot of players this year".

BTopenworld denied speculation that the price hikes were an attempt to move customers from unmetered products onto broadband access.

"That's not the case. Although clearly there are people who will migrate, we don't use pricing as a means to move customers between products," a BTopenworld spokesman said.

The company has 800,000 unmetered access customers and 100,000 broadband users. However, the unmetered business is not currently in profit.

"Customers want an ISP that will be around in the long term, and to do that we need to be profitable," the spokesman said.

Last week, the industry regulator, Oftel, approved BT's price cuts in its wholesale ADSL line rental, bringing the price to resellers down from £25 a month to £14.75. And last month BT cut the price of its lowest cost broadband connection from home users to £29.99 a month, meaning the cost differential is still £14 a month.