ADSL and telephone options

My Mum has asked me to see if I can find a way of making the telephone cheaper.

Currently, with British Telecom, we pay about £65 per quarter for line rental and calls.

Then, we pay £5.99 per month for Plusnet value broadband, which uses DSLMax, but my modem will only ever sync at 2Mbps download speed. It has a 10GB per month cap. This makes a total of around £85 per quarter.

Personally, I wouldn't mind something a little faster with a bit more data transfer per month :ninja:.

To achieve cheaper telephone calls, I would have to switch to a provider other than British Telecom.

Plusnet have a landline service which when combined with their value broadband, comes to £53.22 per quarter (possibly excluding certain calls). It would cost £68.22 if I went for the Extra broadband instead of the Value broadband. Both much cheaper than BT+Plusnet.

Another option I just looked at would be BE. They say I can probably get a 17Mbps connection, but as my exchange doesn't yet have the 21st Century Network (we are getting it at the end of March 2011 apparently), I expect this would use some kind of LLU stuff. BE's broadband, as far as I can tell, is not capped. It would cost about £76 per quarter for both BE broadband and telephone (not including certain calls).

Has anyone had any experience with using a non-BT telephone line?

The idea of not using BT for a telephone line is a little beyond me :huh:. Maybe it will make a bit more sense after I've had some sleep.

Edit: Regarding BE's speeds. I just checked the number of my old house which is on a different exchange, and already has 21CN and was ADSL enabled back in 2000, and their website reckons it can get 7Mbps. I also checked the number of house a couple of miles further away from my exchange, and it thinks that that house will only get 2Mbps!:o

If the exchange can't manage anything over 8Mb/s then Be's value package is perfectly fine as it supports those speeds and has no data caps. And as you say they can also offer phonecalls bundled in too. From what I understand you keep the same phone number and from the users pov there is no difference.

Another alternative is Sky. Do you have Sky? The include free broadband and phone with any sky subscription. So it could work out cheaper getting a sky box with the minimum monthly subscription then get the phone and internet free. Cheapest sky+ package at the moment is £19.99 per month. Or for SkyHD it starts at £29.79 per month. Their included broadband is 20Mb.

I had a look at Sky, and they only give you 5GB per month! That's worse than Plusnet. But you can pay extra and get either unlimited or a more generous cap (can't remember which). Sky does sound like a good idea, but I don't really need the Sky TV.

Who do you get your ADSL from these days harrison?

I'm with TalkTalk, it's something like £27/month for line rental, all calls to landlines at any time, and 24mbps broadband, no usage cap. They also have a cheaper more limited account which works out at about £19/month which has a 40gb limit, and the free calls to landlines is evenings and weekends.

Most broadband providers require you to start with a BT line, and then they either get the line off of BT (I think they use the wholesale part of BT, so whilst I pay TalkTalk for my line rental, it's BT who actually service the physical cables and exchange etc). You essentially just fill in the form on the TalkTalk website and the whole process is "automatic", i.e. they contact BT to get the line off them etc. You might get a new number, so make sure you call Sales to answer any questions before you do it. We kept our number after talking to Sales.

http://broadband.talktalk.co.uk/products/broadband/

I would personally avoid TalkTalk because they unbundle you phoneline, and if you ever wish to leave them and use an alternative ISP/phone provider then you need to pay BT (£160+) to install a new phoneline to your house. Not good.

Answering your question Steve, I use Freeola business broadband at the moment. I have a special deal with them because I've been with them since they began, and when I said i was thinking of leaving they offered me it for £27 per month. Their business broadband offers 768KB upload speed, twice that of normal broadband, and priority traffic during daytime peak hours.

It is hard to choose which ISP to go for. However, with Sky, if I didn't have such demands for a connection and were only using broadband for normal home use the I would just use the free broadband Sky would give me if I asked.

BTW, Sky broadband can be had without subscribing to SkyTV. Looking at their website it's a £2.50 per month surchage for non tv subscribers, so not much. Worth investigating.