In a word, Yes, but it does depend on what you expect to gain by ditching your home phone. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves already so let’s start at the beginning.
For most of us the idea of getting rid of the Landline appeals because we see it as a way to save money, stand to reason right? You currently have Home phone and Home Broadband on your bill, so get rid of one and the bill will go down right? Maybe, but don’t spend your savings just yet….
I’ll assume for the purposes of this blog that you’re thinking of ditching the home phone but keeping broadband – if you’re thinking of ditching the whole lot, well that’s a whole other blog all on its own. You can see an independent list of deals for Broadband without landline here.
The main issue may well be the network that you currently use to receive your home broadband package. For the vast majority of us that means the old BT network that was built to deliver the phone service (NB – don’t get confused here, ‘The Old BT network’ is commonly used to refer to the physical phone network that used to be operated exclusively by BT. It doesn’t mean you currently have to have BT as your phone Provider. Confusingly, many different providers are now able to use ‘The Old BT Network’.).
The telephone network needs a working phone line to be able to deliver a Phone Service OR a Broadband service, which means you’ll still have to pay the monthly line rental charges even if you decide to get rid of the phone element of your package. Sadly you don’t get a reduced line rental by only using it for one service.
So if you use the phone network you’ll still have to pay the line rental charge and a package fee for your Broadband Services. Some Providers will allow you to source these separately – Orange
Is there another network?
Yes there are a couple.
There’s the cable network owned and operated by Virgin Media, however this network is expensive to lay so isn’t available everywhere. The cost means that Virgin also likes to focus on bundled deals and its prices become more competitive the more features you bundle in – Phone, Broadband, TV, Mobile.
The mobile operators also offer Broadband but it’s still fairly expensive and as yet not able to deliver the faster speeds that most households need for streaming tv, downloading or online gaming.
So whilst you may think your Home Phone is redundant don’t dismiss it out of hand – it may be one of those odd things that it’s cheaper to keep even though you really don’t want it, like….
