Why is my line rental so expensive

Vurtual

Like, as it seems, so many people these days, I only really have a home phone line so that I can have broadband ADSL on it. I don't make any calls on my landline and only occasionally receive them.

In total my bill for broadband is £20, £9 for broadband and £11 for a BT line I don't use for anything else. £11 seems an awful lot and a I really want to know why OFCOM don't do anything about it.

Lets look at it. For £9 I get fast broadband ( could actually get it for £6 somewhere else) for which I get routers in cabinets, support, high-speed cables under the sea etc. For £11 from BT I get to use a piece of copper wire that was buried under my drive in 1958. Yes, 1958. Since BT laid that line I ( or the previous occupants) have paid BT £6,292 for the priveledge of receiving low quality voice calls. True, I am also receiving the ability to have BT support and a box with a Nortel router (Cost approx £1,200 and servicing 200 houses) in it at the end of the road. I am not, however getting anything else, as the cost of the wider infrastructure is surely born by the cost of actually making calls (which I don't, did I mention that). Why am I paying £121 a year for a piece of copper that was amortised a long time ago. Why are Ofcom making me do this? Why does this not seem to annoy anyone else?

Looking forward to your comments.
Al

jb66

Because BT is a business and needs to make money

Mark_In_Hampshire

What you are asking for is called "Naked DSL" and is available in some countries, though not this one: the ability to buy "only the broadband".

You'll find one of the factors in the pricing is the way in which regulation takes place, but that's thanks to the short-sighted way in which the privatisation occured. At that time broadband was something few people had even heard of.

You can however get something close to what you're after:

http://www.aaisp.net.uk/broadband-phoneline.html

The ISP organises the line and you deal only with them. This would be a good option if you only intended to use VOIP services and wanted to take a line from a decent broadband specialist who knows what they're doing, unlike most of the larger volume companies.

This is the service I'd go for if I wanted broadband for business and could actually get it at a decent speed.

However it isn't any cheaper, since the fee for the installation and line rental is much the same as it would be anywhere else.

Naked DSL was looked into and apparently "there was no demand for it" which I find hard to believe.

At £9 per month, you'd only need to spend 15 minutes on the phone to your ISP and they've probably lost money servicing you for several months.

Your ISP is only financially responsible for the broadband connection. If you could have broadband without paying line rental, you'd find your broadband would not be £9 per month. Someone has to pay to maintain the phone network on which the broadband relies.

Until BT Openreach is renationalised, I suspect all of this is as good as it's going to get.

iniltous

You ask why OFCOM dont do anything about the outrageous 30p a day line rental charge, well thats the price OFCOM set, the local access network is regulated and the price allowed by OFCOM gives a tiny return on BT's investment, if you dont like paying BT to use its 50 year old copper line dont, cease your service and use a mobile broadband dongle

Heinz

My monthly TV licence direct debit is more than my monthly direct debit from BT for my telephone line rental so, by comparison, the latter seems quite reasonable (the TV licence just allows me to watch TV. At least the line rental allows me to do something)!

schoon

Couldn't agree with you more. The line rental seems to be a remnant from the old days when everything was exorbitantly BT priced. It might be only 30p a day, but it costs BT next to nothing and there are millions of them. Would you pay 30p a day for a website?

And if it goes wrong in your house it is your problem, I believe. Imagine renting a 1958 car that, if used on the road, was your responsibility to fix.

Steveseven

Do you have a mobile phone,?

o2 offer bb and line rental deal if your a mobile customer, have a look at some of those options.

iniltous

schoon wrote: »

Couldn't agree with you more. The line rental seems to be a remnant from the old days when everything was exorbitantly BT priced. It might be only 30p a day, but it costs BT next to nothing and there are millions of them. Would you pay 30p a day for a website?

And if it goes wrong in your house it is your problem, I believe. Imagine renting a 1958 car that, if used on the road, was your responsibility to fix.

In a world where BT couldnt even get 30p/day rental for the copper line and a JCB dug up the cable outside your house and your broadband went off, who would you expect to fix it ??
What do you base the 'it costs BT next to nothing' comment on ?, after all OFCOM who have access to BT's books came up with the figure of 30p/day, you on the other had have nothing but ignorance to base your comment on....
The only part of the line the end user is responsible for is whats connected to the consumer panel of the master socket, after all if you plug a sky box into the telephone line and it goes faulty and causes a fault on the telephone line, and the end user is unwilling to unplug the sky box , so a BT engineer has to come out to unplug the box (and the line starts working), who should pay ?, the end user ?, sky ? or BT ???, after all it wasnt BT fault was it ? put it this way fill up your brand new petrol car with diesil and the car maker wont fix it for free even though its under warranty,
On your car analogy if a car rental firm said in its adverts, its cars were MOT'd, taxed and insured, clean and reliable and ranged from 50 years old to brand new, then its your choice if you rent one or not, dont like the odds on getting an old one, then use a different car rental firm.. chose this firm and if you get a 50 year old one, then thats the luck of the draw, someone else will have got the brand new one, but as they are equally capable of making the journey whats the problem

moonrakerz

schoon wrote: »

but it costs BT next to nothing

What utter nonsense !