2 phone lines separate bills

99puffins

hi, my daughter had a phone line installed at her rented home so she could get broadband.  It is a split house, someone else moved in too and wanted broadband. Their provider did this by taking my daughter's phoneline! My daughter's provider EE says that they cannot get another line installed as you cannot have 2 lines to the same address with different  bill names. The only way to do this is to get the landlord to tell the Post Office that it is 2 separate dwellings ie flat 1 and flat 2.The landlord doesn't want to do this, presumably for council tax reasons!  Has anyone else come across this and how did you resolve it?

southsidergs

You can have multiple lines into the same address however if these are 2 separate flats they should be registered as separate addresses

matelodave

Have you (or she) explored the possiblity of using the 4G network and doing away with the requirement for a separate phone line. She could set up her mobile to see it's it a viable alternative before taking the plunge and getting a 4g router

Why did your daughter not just reclaim the phone line if it was hers in the first place.Presumably the other tenant has now taken over responsility for the whole bill if it's now in their name.

Neil_Jones

99puffins said:

hi, my daughter had a phone line installed at her rented home so she could get broadband.  It is a split house, someone else moved in too and wanted broadband. Their provider did this by taking my daughter's phoneline! My daughter's provider EE says that they cannot get another line installed as you cannot have 2 lines to the same address with different  bill names. The only way to do this is to get the landlord to tell the Post Office that it is 2 separate dwellings ie flat 1 and flat 2.The landlord doesn't want to do this, presumably for council tax reasons!  Has anyone else come across this and how did you resolve it?

You can have as many phone lines as you like if you're prepared to pay for them.  It'll need another connection to the telegraph pole  and face panel but that's easy enough to do by Openreach.

As for telling "the Post Office", or the GPO as it used to be, they've had nothing to do with telephone lines since the 1980s, unless you actually mean Post Office the internet provider (soon to be Shell)?

littleboo

I assume the reference to the Post Office was for the address - it seems that the LL may have converted a single property to two separate dwellings but are known as no 29, rather than 29A and 29B

Neil_Jones

littleboo said:

I assume the reference to the Post Office was for the address - it seems that the LL may have converted a single property to two separate dwellings but are known as no 29, rather than 29A and 29B

But that isn't anything to do with the Post Office.  The Post Office in its modern form is just a shop (in a nutshell) where you can drop off parcels and access various government and financial services, and the Royal Mail go round with their red vans, collect, sort and distribute post.  They are two entirely different companies.  They used to be one until it was split, but Royal Mail has been around in one guise or another for the last 500 years.

Royal Mail will decide what post code you get but if the property has been converted to two separate dwellings they'll just whatever the rest of the road has.  They will not issue a postcode for a new street unless requested to do so by the Council.  If you decide to make a 29A and keep 29 you should go to the council for planning permission and the data gets fed back to Royal Mail.

So TL;DR - it could probably be arranged to have a second phone installed at the property in question if the property has been split this way.