Is this possible. Don’t really understand why I should pay for a phone which nobody in the house uses whatsoever. Does any company offer fibre without needing to bundle a phone in?

I believe you have to pay line rental to someone. Yes ISP will offer broadband without phone but you have to pay BT for line in that case

If your in an area they cover you could do Virgin cable broadband.

Cable?

Virgin will do it I think. Snag is, conventionally you still have a line that you need to rent for your broadband – you just are not choosing to do much talking down it, just sending data down it.

Most “fibre” is fibre to the cabinet – the last leg to your house is still over copper which is where the phone line comes in. I feel your pain, though arguably your “line rental” is a maintenance contract for the network infrastructure these days.

Doing away with your copper “last mile” and running fibre direct to the premises is hellishly expensive. To give you a ballpark idea, we have FTTP at work; it’s a 10Mbps connection and we pay around £700 a month for it).

Your only real option is Virgin cable; that doesn’t use a phone line at all. The problem then is, they know it and price accordingly to compete with FTTC + line rental so you’re not necessarily saving much money overall.

Yes – if you want to use a mobile network, just just a 4G router and use that, or a satilite connection but they’re very expensive and unreliable compared to using the telephone network or cable TV network.

Ultimately, someone, somewhere is going to have to run a cable from a exchange to your house and they’ll have to maintain that network and everyone has to pay their little bit to maintain it.

They do themselves no favours by selling the virtue of the landline because no one under 40 use them anymore, but the OpenReach network is a telephone network and every line has a number – so they throw in the landline as it’s there anyway to try to ‘add value’.

You can have your own line installed if you want, you have to lease it – typically you’re looking at £3k-£5k instalation and about £500 a month lease costs – but you get very fast speeds.

The scary part is how much call rates have crept up since people stopped using their landlines as a way to push you onto a calls bundle too

virgin and no line rental £25 ish

It’s Still a rip off but i never watched the telly and did not even have a phone plugged in

4G dongle – guess it will stream films without buffering – mine got over 15 MB in Liverpool iirc. I doubt its a cost effective solution for large data users

Yet another B.S. rip off ..

It’s tedious but it’s a function of history: BT Openreach retains an effective monopoly over the connection between your house and the exchange (where your ISP’s network takes over). Your ISP has to pay to access this stretch, so you end up with a line rental cost.

Since – other than the limited circumstances described above – your broadband cost has always been made up of line rental + your ISP’s monthly fee for its services, from 31 October the ASA requires all ISPs to give you a single, combined price.

This will be the same price you would have paid, but it isn’t so misleading.

I’m with EE broadband, i pay an upfront fee of around £160ish for a years line rental and a nominal sum of 70pence/month (or thereabouts) – I don’t have/use a house phone.

Doing away with your copper “last mile” and running fibre direct to the premises is hellishly expensive. To give you a ballpark idea, we have FTTP at work; it’s a 10Mbps connection and we pay around £700 a month for it).

Driven by two things:

1. BT has a vested interest in that vast copper network it owns, and so has sought to sweat that asset as much as possible – great for monolithic, monopolistic BT but not great for innovation in connectivity. That’s why they backed FTTC, which is effectively the wrong decision for the UK.

2. FTTP is a complex, low volume product that requires either access to BT’s ducts or for lengthy stretches of road to be dug up. Look at the effort made by Sky and TalkTalk in York (gigabit fibre): it’s doable and the users who have it love it, but the infrastructure cost of delivering the future is massive. What are BT doing? G.Fast – still copper technology.

As junk yard, i’ve got a mifi box, which is mobile 4G broadband in a WiFi box which you can connect various devices to. I’m on Vodafone 20gig a month for £20 which is fine for me as I’m not a big downloader. The device was £70 from maplin (tp-link m7350, recommended). Tbh it’s not much cheaper than standard broadband and line rental, I’m only doing it because I’m only in this house for 6 months and couldn’t be arsed sorting out bt line and cheap broadband deals are usually 12 months contract. The box has decent range certainly I can be on the laptop upstairs with the box downstairs.

i pay an upfront fee of around £160ish for a years line rental

I’m with Sky and after threatening to leave pay about half of that. Think it’s £8/month.

Nice !

I also have a mobile wifi device which works very well (better than phone tethering) but imo its not a replacement for line/cable broadband.

I’ve got Virgin and BT wires into the house. Wouldn’t touch Virgin with a bargepole. I actually left them and paid line rental to get BT rather than suffer the useless crap that was Virgin (or NTL as the name they went under back then, but they haven’t changed hence most my neighbours have a BT line based ISP and Sky dish for telly, despite cabled street).

Go with PlusNet Fibre with line rental. It’s BT owned but cheaper and good (relatively) customer service. Catch though is the prices are based on Openreach tiers and if you live in a less popular exchange area you pay more.

p.s. personally I still prefer a landline for phone calls. Really annoys me when people call me on their mobile when I know they’re calling from somewhere with a landline or worse their mobile to my mobile. Quality is rubbish.

To counter the above. 20 years with NTL/Virgin and never a problem other than a clown with a back hoe taking out the fibre backbone at Colchester about 20 years ago.

Really annoys me when people call me on their mobile when I know they’re calling from somewhere with a landline

Calls from my mobile are free, calls from the landline cost money. Possibly your friends are similar?

Cougar – Moderator
Calls from my mobile are free, calls from the landline cost money. Possibly your friends are similar?

Very likely. Just half the time I can’t hear them. Breaking up, drops out, and then there are those who stick it on speaker as well to make it worse.

May be free, but it’s crap. Still amazed mobile voice quality hasn’t improved much over the years. Doesn’t help with poor reception in buildings, especially residential.

Work calls are similar and even worse with mobiles calling into a conference call.