BT don't do broadband only. They gave me some nonsense that providing a phone package allows them to provide a better quality service. I pretty much laughed in the rep's face and they hung up on me.

BT do do BB Only if you have BTw phone with someone else and you phone them up to order. Just don't advertise it on website.

Well We're with the post office because it saves us a lot of money and we don't have mysterious numbers appearing on our bill which their CS refused to investigate.

I told the rep this and he refused to offer me any broadband-only deals. Besides, their prices are much higher than plusnet too.

Over the last few years PN were pretty upfront about their use of traffic/network management and provided you spent some time going through their website you would find it, like you I have found of late that looking for product packages or more in depth info seems to becoming more time consuming to find than it was some years ago ..... it is available but buried deeper within the web-pages

I can only think that Plusnet must be getting ready to ditch broadband only packages, or at very least evaluating the possibility of ditching them.

Why else would they run this test?

correct but with BT it doesnt matter for me as I want a BT retail voice line anyway.

Any other isp I go with would have to be broadband only service.

Who knows?
Maybe the big boys have screwed up by offering BB so cheaply, in order to get a large customer base, that there is very little money in it for them,so they must think they can get more profit from the customer from the voice + line rental route.

Looks like the next phase for them to make money is to provide and offer on-line TV packages especially with a now growing base of customers taking up fibre connections where possible.

A thoery I read also is that line rental has a margin big enough that it subsidises otherwise unproftable broadband, notice that line rental's continue to go up whilst broadband pricing is static.

Yeah, I don't think they are banking on the calls making the money, the line rental (which in many cases costs more than the broadband now) is what makes the dough. So in effect the broadband becomes a loss leader for the line rental (can't see the likes of Talktalk offering £3.25 broadband for a year without the £14.95 line rental coming in).

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

Yeah, I don't think they are banking on the calls making the money, the line rental (which in many cases costs more than the broadband now) is what makes the dough. So in effect the broadband becomes a loss leader for the line rental (can't see the likes of Talktalk offering £3.25 broadband for a year without the £14.95 line rental coming in).

thats my take on it also.

which is also why we never see half price line rental offers, the half price deals or free for X months is always only on the broadband subs,

So sky loss lead on broadband for tv (and now line rental).
and it seems isp's like plusnet which used to be broadband focused now are using broadband to get line rental subs.