Have I got this right?

I have an old fashioned copper landline phone service in my home and a Virgin cable service for the internet. Virgin are very sneaky at putting up their prices so I am about to move to BT for internet (they have just re-cabled the street and its poles so they can now run fibre optic cables to my house). I shall opt to use the BT hub for my (new digital) phone line too. In fact, it seems this is compulsory. It appears that in doing this I will cut my costs hugely simply because BT will no longer be charging me a monthly line rental fee of about £22 for the copper wire. Have I understood this correctly? I shall call them in the morning to confirm but thought I'd ask here first to see if this is indeed their basic proposition. The concept of abolishing the monthly line rental is simply not mentioned anywhere of the BT website. You would think they'd make it the headline to grab attention and customers!

I am just looking at a BT Consomer/Residential install for someone. They are offering full fibre for around £30/month at 500Mbps, if they want digital voice it goes up to £35. And that is it.

Edited by MHC (Mon 27-Feb-23 09:53:05)

Don't be fooled by we are not charging a line rental rubbish, you don't save any money in the long run as the cost of the line rental is still there in your broadband.

Ok, I am with plusnet and I pay £24.58 for my broadband and line rental for a 36Mb/s FTTC connection, so they put the line rental as £23.19 and they class the other £1.39 as my broadband,
If I went to full fibre on plusnet for the same speed, so no line rental, it would cost me £23.99.

So if I was not paying line rental, then in theory it should be a lot cheaper.

Don't be fooled by we are not charging a line rental rubbish, you don't save any money in the long run as the cost of the line rental is still there in your broadband.

Ok, I am with plusnet and I pay £24.58 for my broadband and line rental for a 36Mb/s FTTC connection, so they put the line rental as £23.19 and they class the other £1.39 as my broadband,
If I went to full fibre on plusnet for the same speed, so no line rental, it would cost me £23.99.

So if I was not paying line rental, then in theory it should be a lot cheaper.


Most providers are putting up their prices in March or around that time, blame Ofcom for allowing it. I would not change until after March if you can avoid it, otherwise the price of your BT connection will increase by around 14%.

In reply to a post by IanAlexander:

The concept of abolishing the monthly line rental is simply not mentioned anywhere of the BT website. You would think they'd make it the headline to grab attention and customers!

Vodafone started this, building "one price" for phone & broadband.

Don't forget as of Sept this year, you won't be able to order a new voice service via the openreach copper, and in 2025 all voice services will have to convert to digital, (through a box, either an internet router, or a smaller box), and so the concept of "line rental" for a voice service has to go.

The cost of the line (copper to exchange, copper to box, or full fibre) is included in the other service you by. Openreach has a price list that the Communications Provider pays (e.g. TalkTalk, Vodafone, BT Retail, Plusnet etc).

Edited by jchamier (Mon 27-Feb-23 08:56:12)

You will save money because at the moment you're paying for the upkeep of two lines (BT and Virgin), whereas if you go with BT FTTP you'll be paying for only one...

The key here is that at present they are paying for a Virgin line and a BT (voice only) line. They are essentially paying 2 lots of line rental. By moving broadband to BT they will remove 1 of the lots of line rental. They could also have moved their phone to Virgin which would have had the same effect.

I assume you are also aware that BT have an annual increase to their services of inflation+3.9% (I think it is 3.9%, if not very near that). So, within the contract you will get potentially large increases depending on where inflation is at.

In reply to a post by ian72:

I assume you are also aware that BT have an annual increase to their services of inflation+3.9% (I think it is 3.9%, if not very near that). So, within the contract you will get potentially large increases depending on where inflation is at.

I think BT is CPI + 3.9%, and Virgin Media is RPI+3.9%, which hits 17.3% this year:
https://www.virginmedia.com/mobile/annual-rpi-price-...

Edited by jchamier (Mon 27-Feb-23 11:09:08)