Once unbundled you have to pay to change

howard_bretman · 10 February 2010 at 3:51PM

I was thinking of going for a Sky bundled deal for tv, phone and broadband. When I said I was at present with talktalk I was told that as it was an unbundled line I would have to pay BT £100 for them to take the line back. Is this legal as there was no mention of this charge happening when I first changed over to talktalk. To me this seems similar to Martin's crusade against banks and building societies changing the release charge well after the mortgage was taken out. I also cannot see how they can justify that sort of charge when talktalk would remove their equipment and all BT have to do is connect a pair of wires together.

dylanuk · 10 February 2010 at 4:29PM

BT have a standard charge in their T&C's of £125 if an engineer needs to be called out to connect or reconnect a BT landline.

It's a standard charge, has always been around. A similar thing happened to me when people stayed at my house, had Virgin Media installed, and VM chopped the BT telephone line to use the master socket, so had to pay £125 for a BT engineer to come and put some sticky tape around the two ends of cable (not literally, well fairly but inside a weatherproof box!).

There wouldn't of been a mention of it when you went to TalkTalk - because whether or not you go back to BT is quite a separate matter and nothing to do with the service TalkTalk are providing.

Sometimes BT have free line installation offers running, but you normally have to take BT broadband as well. You can get the Plusnet line rental installed for about £75 I think, but again you'd have to take out Plusnet broadband for 12 months before you could go to Sky.