Why £79 initial fee?

I just moved into a rented home. There is a standard telephone socket and there are extensions from that to a Virgin Media set-up which the previous tenant presumably was using. We were thinking of getting TalkTalk Essentials but have been told that there will be a £79 fee for an engineer to visit to put a phone line in. Is this really necessary - can't it be turned on remotely?

Thanks for your advice,

Andrew

Are you sure your not getting confused with virgin cable?

If it is a normal say bt phone socket do you get a dialing tone if you plug a phone into it?

If they had virgin media cable previously installed, then it may need an engineer to reconnect the wiring to the BT network.

Thanks for the replies. I see now that there is a Virgin box on the outside of the house - sorry for my ignorance - I didn't realise that cable looks the same inside the house. There is also a line coming in near the top of the house from a telegraph pole. Not sure yet if I can follow these lines to see which goes where. If there is a BT line and socket would we need an engineer?

(In this situation should we consider getting Virgin Broadband instead? - apologies since I suppose this is off-topic)

I had similar experience last year when moving to a new property, although the cost to reconnect was almost double. I just said I would go elsewhere; the sales person had a quick chat with their supervisor and was subsequently reduced to zero!

Virgin broadband if available is an option to consider, buy their 30Meg service and it will connect at 30Meg all the time, avoiding the issues of phone line length.

Even if the BT line in place, the actual switch flicking (or amount of wiring changes needed at the exchange) still mean Openreach will charge. i.e. the connection is present in practically all cases. This evens out so that those who need work done don't pay as much as the real work would cost, and others perhaps pay more than they need to.