Vodafone to include line rental in cost

BBC link.

Vodafone page.

As played out on twitter, just jumping slightly ahead of the curve on the ASA changes that are on the way, and we've been switching to on our listings for some months now.

It'll be interesting to see what it does to the market, It appears to make Virgin's Broadband only deal look quite expensive.

Which makes little difference as the line rental is still there but now hidden, could confuse people even more. At least with showing the line rental you do know what you are paying for.
The only advantage is that the price will be slightly lower, but that £49 connection fee for fibre wipes out most of the saving.

I think this is how it needs to be but everyone needs to show the pricing like this or it gets confusing.

Customers don't need to know which bit is line rental and which bit isn't, it's pointless!

A line goes to your house then somewhere along the way you'll pay for it, no big deal really.

I think this actually plays into the hands of Openreach, since the ability for people to moan about paying £X for line rental and getting nothing back suddenly vanishes.

I agree in that respect, but it also plays into the hiding by the big boys of the exorbitant prices they charge for line rental and call charges. Ideal for BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone.

People moaning about line rental prices and call charges/packages simply aren't aware of the appallingly high margin the big retailers are achieving on those. It would have made a lot more sense for Ofcom to have put a cap on those margins and bring the true prices of broadband and "free sport" etc. into the glare of publicity.

Combining the prices is a complete stitch-up masquerading as openness. More detail and transparency/honesty is what is needed, not this.

Have repeated the line that wholesale line rental costs have been coming down over the last few years generally, or at least flat, the opposite of the retail pricing. Alas gets lost in the Openreach/BT is evil coverage.

Some of the most recent broadband campaigning stuff is as real put together as all the leave/remain stuff this year, i.e. so many holes and question marks it is clearly designed to produce an emotional response rather than looking at any actual data.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Have repeated the line that wholesale line rental costs have been coming down over the last few years generally, or at least flat, the opposite of the retail pricing. Alas gets lost in the Openreach/BT is evil coverage.

Yeah that's obvious in places like Sky's official forum. Customers there complain whenever Sky increase line rental charges, then the usual fanboys blame Openreach for increasing wholesale prices when in fact they are not increasing at all.