Donate SIGN UP

Landline Telephone And Internet

Avatar Image
KARL | 20:43 Mon 30th Jul 2018 | How it Works
16 Answers
To the best of my knowledge, nobody (in the UK) offers landline internet on its own and all providers offer services consisting of both telephone and internet (no option for internet only, although telephone only is available).

We currently have a contract for landline telephone and "unlimited" internet service at a monthly cost of just over £21 per month including line rental (i.e. total bill). Furthermore and again to the best of my knowledge, nobody in the UK offers the customer the option of suspending the service for a period (not needed, zero usage) and then resuming it - billing is at a fixed level and continuous/uninterrupted throughout the "contract period" (captive customer).

Does anyone know a) of a provider which provides what I described above as unavailable, and b) a provider who offers telephone and internet at a significantly lower cost than £21 per month ?
Gravatar

Answers

1 to 16 of 16rss feed

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by KARL. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
No, Karl, but take your point.

We were thinking of giving up our scarcely-used landline until we realised that our relatives in Sweden and Ireland would face greatly increased charges when they phoned us - on our mobiles!

Seems we are stuck, like you.

BillB
I am just looking at what you would like - and BT would like me to pay an extra £15 on top of the £60 making it £75.
You can't have internet only, as it comes down your telephone line.

You should opt though to pay by the call, not on a callplan. That way if you don't ring out, you won't pay for any calls. That is sort of internet only.
JJ - I don't know where you get your BT total of £75 from!
You are joking,£21 month for Landline and Internet including Line Rental,sign me up.!!
//// We were thinking of giving up our scarcely-used landline until we realised that our relatives in Sweden and Ireland would face greatly increased charges when they phoned us - on our mobiles!

Seems we are stuck, like you. ////

..... ditch your landline and get yourself (and your friends abroad) on Skype :)
Just pop your postcode in the box and see what the best deals are .. you may get it for under £21.00 depending on length of contract and speed..

https://www.broadband-finder.co.uk/compare/broadband-deals#sort=recommended&postcode=
Sorry the link didn't work ...

https://www.broadband-finder.co.uk
Mine is a tad more at around £25 per month for telephone and broadband. I thought this was cheap.
ala - that's a good link - will peruse tomorrow - thanks
You'll never find a service that allows you to stop and start your usage of internet services (other than, possibly, at a horrendous price) because the ISP that you're buying the service from has to enter into a contract with BT Wholesale and they don't offer such a facility unless the ISP pays an arm and a leg for it. (Given that it's often necessary for an engineer to visit an unstaffed exchange in order to enable or disable a service, that seems to be perfectly reasonable to me).
That is ridiculously cheap, who are you with, I would love to know. I have been with BT for years and just for the landline and broadband and free weekend calls I am paying £45.00 per month. If you want just broadband you should go with Virgin, although I did ask them and the best they could do was £32.00
I am now on my third contract with Post Office Homephone, paying £19/ month for unlimited broadband and free weekend calls- the current offer is £18/month.

https://www.postoffice.co.uk/broadband-phone
Question Author
I thank everyone for the responses and I will now deal with each point in the order they were made. But first I will explain that we have landline telephone and internet services in three different countries including the UK. In the UK the deal is as I described it in the OP. In one of the other countries we have "unlimited" internet and free calls to "geographic" type landline numbers in the country for around £8 a month but we can suspend part of the service for up to 4 months per year. Both the UK and other are over copper lines.

In the third country we have "unlimited" landline internet and telephone service with free calls to landline and mobile numbers in over 40 different countries worldwide, only premium numbers are excluded. The service is over optical fibre right into the property (no copper anywhere), the router and Phone plug directly into the fibre terminal. This service can be suspended in its entirety at will at any time and the bill then falls to zero. The monthly cost is around £38 per month of use but in our case when spread over the year it works out at less than £13 per month - through the generous call package we of course get a lot of use out of it when we use it.

In the third example above it is possible to have internet only and I know of other countries where the same applies, but that is not the case in the UK. Where you take internet only you pay for the internet as an item over and above the line charge - you can then add a telephone service if you desire. In the UK we are currently on a no free calls at all and pay for each one by type and duration (however, see below) so we are on the lowest routine cost arrangement offered by the provider but it is a telephone and internet package - we can at least receive calls without any concerns about cost. We are unlikely to bother changing unless savings of several pounds per month are in prospect.

When on Skype one does not have a telephone number as such so cannot be called unless the caller is also on Skype and one is by the computer when the call arrives. We do not use mobile phones, which in themselves mostly cost quite a lot of money to run which must be factored into the accounting - Skype can be completely free but the mobiles certainly are not. Add to that that since quite recently Skype is now only accessible via 64bit technology and some of us need to upgrade the equipment to make use of Skype.

When trying to have a look at the https://www.broadband-finder.co.uk site I got a Firefox message telling me that it refused to connect because the site is improperly configured and that my connection would be insecure. I will see what I can get out of this in a later re-attempt.

It has been my understanding that all telephone exchanges in the UK have been computerised and remotely controllable via the software for quite some time. Thus the notion that someone has plug in and unplug things for individual customers/consumers seems distinctly out of place. Indeed, our current UK provider sometimes does an electronic check and adjustment to our service if/when we detect any anomaly, there has never been any suggestion. However, I am aware that under some circumstances quite a bit of fuss is made of how "complicated" things are when BT get involved.

We are with TalkTalk and the "package" is called something like "Basic", "Standard" or some such thing. We have no calls for free except that if we call another TalkTalk (and/or subsidiaries/associated providers) customer the call is free. We have caller's number display included for free. I am aware that others are very set against TalkTalk and we have not been without incident but I have to say that overall we would not be any better off with anyone else. We were with BT for the longest while and, based on the experience at the end, would not go back unless they paid us for using their service. To be continued....
Question Author
Part 2

We came across the same "service" attitude with the ex-nationalised monopolies in the other two countries I referred to above and left one of them - we don't have a choice in the second case as that is one of an enduring monopoly.

At £18 the Post Office Homephone is worth looking into.
Looks like Post Office home phone & broadband plans now start from just £15.90p/m including line rental.

According to https://broadbandinternetuk.com/broadband-provider-reviews/post-office-broadband-review.php the Post Office generated only 9 complaints per 100,000 customers in Ofcom's latest report. Industry average is 15.

1 to 16 of 16rss feed

Do you know the answer?

Landline Telephone And Internet

Answer Question >>