Broadband without landline phone?

matelodave

There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding as to the subtle differnce between a land line - which is the physical connected between your house and the service provider, (much like gas, leccy and water where you pay a standing charge for it's provision and maintenance) and the service which is either an internet service and/or a telephone service or gas, leccy or water for which you pay extra.

So although you may feel that because you dont use the phone service (ie make phone calls) it doesn't mean that the means of getting broadband to your house (whether it's coax, twisted pair or optical fibre etc) is free and doesn't have a cost which has to be paid for. As there is no way that one can be divorced from the other - you can't a have a service without the line and there's no point in having a line unless you have the service - then you have to pay it whether its a separate line item or rolled up in the total charge.

Even if you go mobile, there is a cost within the sevice for the provison of the infrastructure which although not shown separately is there. You dont really think that you get free calls, texts or data do you? 

iniltous

JakeRayson said:

pineapple said:

Has anyone done this? I'm paying a ridiculous price for BT landline and broadband. I hardly use the landline 'phone so looking at cheaper options.  

We have fibre to the house, so don't need the landline. I've made repeated calls to BT, and we're not allowed to ditch the landline, it's all "part of the package" apparently. So, I've made a complaint to BT:

We have a Fibre 2 Broadband Package. As part of the package, we have a telephone line. The line rental for the phone line appears to be £19.99 per month, although it depends upon who you talk to at BT.

I have said that we don't require the telephone line and don't want to pay for it, and have asked that it is removed from our package.

However, we have been told that this isn't possible. Technically, I think it is possible (the broadband is on fibre, the telephone line is on copper), and this is an administrative decision.

My complaint is that we should not be paying for a bundled service that we don't require.

I can envisage a complaint to Ofcom at some point in the future!

If you have a fibre to the house ( FTTP/FTTH) , then your ‘line rental’ is for the fibre line ( if you want to think of it in those terms ), if you could have what you want ( broadband without the option of making or receiving calls ) that can easily be achieved by simply not connecting a phone....the problem ( potentially ) is with some who think the bill will reduce by £20 if they don’t have a phone service, hopefully you are not one of those fools that think that.
As already stated, if you have FTTP , you can have a no phone service option ( maybe not from BT yet ) but other FTTP providers that also use Openreach do offer it, but the saving is negligible, compared to taking both phone and broadband.
Complaining to Ofcom would be interesting, exactly what’s the complaint ? if don’t want to have to pay the £1 or £2 a month for for a phone service you don’t need, ( because that’s the level of reduction if you are lucky ) simple, use a company that will sell you that, no one needs to use BT , so use someone else that does offer what you want.
You may be correct about administrative reasons, historically the phone service number was your starting point should you call customer service....without a phone number , you would have to keep your account number readily available (most will know their phone number , not the account number) and ‘BT’ will use a system designed around account numbers associated with phone numbers.
If the cost were exactly the same ( not , say £1 cheaper ) and the phone service were included for ‘free’ , just pay for the calls make would you be happier ?

JJ_Egan

As above .

I have FTTP .

Pay LIne Rental for the line to transmit the data down .

I do not use the phone and do not pay for it .

pbartlett

i use my mobile phone as a hotspot and pay three £20 a month for unlimited data, calls, texts

perfect for my needs but they do have a fair use policy so if you binge every day on netflix then this is probably not for you.

[Deleted User]

The likes of the providers who offer broadband through a connection to your house have nothing to worry about from mobile networks eating their lunch in fact they won't even be able to eat their random snack

Hopefully more price competition will happen if 5G can be rolled out at scale and reliability and compete on price until then I would never use mobile as my main internet connection at home. 

pokora

There are providers that offer only broadband, you just need to check in your postcode the options available. As others say, you can't force any provider to split "packs" and you won't save a lot removing the landline.