BT Digital Voice - BT Landline Still Required?

[Kinky]

Totally confused by this; so any help much appreciated. I've been through BT's website, and forum and still no clearer.

Relates to my broadband and landline. My broadband and landline are via BT. My BB package is the Fibre option, giving me ~73mb speeds.

BT are about to move me onto BT Digital Voice. So I'll need to plug my landline phone into the BT Hub. Which I think means my landline becomes redundant. But I'm not clear on that; if I still need the landline. And if not, will BT automatically cancel it and automatically reduce my monthly bill to remove the landline cost (IIRC it's about £25 a month).

Any clarity would be much appreciated

[b0rk]

The copper landline will be disconnected if you’re moving to full fibre or in BT speak “ultrafast”.

Have BT discribed the product as “superfast” or “ultrafast”.

Superfast still uses the copper loop but is now sold as an “all in” product with no separate line rental.

[JulianHJ]

We’ve got FTTP and a year or two back BT disconnected the copper line, which we’d been using for the landline. They sent a new handset free of charge when I enquired. I’ve since binned the new ‘landline’ as it was an extra £5 a month that wasn’t getting used enough to justify keeping.

[James6112]

Usually, for example

Landline £10 / BB £15

You don’t need a landline any more sir!

That’ll be £25

Smoke & mirrors.

[Caddyshack]

Will they eventually remove all of the overhead cables from houses and roadsides? I imagine the caravan enthusiasts that love dags would recycle them?

[A500leroy]

Do EE offer Digital voice as I know Plusnet dont.

[595Heaven]

We’ve just moved on to Gigaclear fibre. They supplied it overhead so we’ve now got the landline and fibre coming off the same telegraph pole. Landline now out of service though.

Gigaclear basically provides two Ethernet socket on their termination inside the house. One goes to the mesh system they supplied, the other to a box that allows us to connect our old DECT phone to it. Don’t seem to be many native Ethernet home phones around yet.

Almost didn’t bother, but it was £3 a month to add the phone so not worth worrying about.

[Kinky]

Thanks for the replies everyone

It dawned on me this morning that if there was a saving to be had then they'd have made a big play on it in the 2 different marcoms they sent me. But no mention at all.

James6112 said:

Usually, for example

Landline £10 / BB £15

You don’t need a landline any more sir!

That’ll be £25

Smoke & mirrors.

That seems so sum it up perfectly!

[Kinky]

b0rk said:

Have BT discribed the product as “superfast” or “ultrafast”.

Superfast still uses the copper loop but is now sold as an “all in” product with no separate line rental.

Absolutely no mention to 'internet' whatsoever. But as above "smoke and mirrors"

I guess I'll spend today comparing service providers.

Also have the option of FTTP with Gigaclear, Swish or Trooli. So will throw that into the mix

[Evolved]

Kinky said:

Thanks for the replies everyone

It dawned on me this morning that if there was a saving to be had then they'd have made a big play on it in the 2 different marcoms they sent me. But no mention at all.

James6112 said:

Usually, for example

Landline £10 / BB £15

You don’t need a landline any more sir!

That’ll be £25

Smoke & mirrors.

That seems so sum it up perfectly!

It’s marketing waffle. Essentially it’s no different to VOIP in its offering. Calls through an internet connection. The old blag of needing to charge for a landline will be wrapped up in the new ‘digital voice’ offering. Grifters.

[FMOB]

Evolved said:

Kinky said:

Thanks for the replies everyone

It dawned on me this morning that if there was a saving to be had then they'd have made a big play on it in the 2 different marcoms they sent me. But no mention at all.

James6112 said:

Usually, for example

Landline £10 / BB £15

You don’t need a landline any more sir!

That’ll be £25

Smoke & mirrors.

That seems so sum it up perfectly!

It’s marketing waffle. Essentially it’s no different to VOIP in its offering. Calls through an internet connection. The old blag of needing to charge for a landline will be wrapped up in the new ‘digital voice’ offering. Grifters.

For the customer they pay the same as they lose the copper wire but gain probably a plastic or glass one so still renting a cable.

BT on the other hand save the cost of powering the copper line 24/7 which is a huge boost to their bottom line.

[Uncle boshy]

At 73mb you’ll be on fttc - fibre to the green cabinet on the roadside and then copper into your house. So in your case, whilst the telephone is switched to digital ( ie voice over IP) it’s still delivered over the copper cable

[normalbloke]

Uncle boshy said:

At 73mb you’ll be on fttc - fibre to the green cabinet on the roadside and then copper into your house. So in your case, whilst the telephone is switched to digital ( ie voice over IP) it’s still delivered over the copper cable

This. Take the opportunity to use one of the other providers for FTTP, and enjoy the pleasant feeling of being able to dump the BT/Openreach stshow in the gutter where they belong…

[silentbrown]

Kinky said:

Thanks for the replies everyone

It dawned on me this morning that if there was a saving to be had then they'd have made a big play on it in the 2 different marcoms they sent me. But no mention at all.

James6112 said:

Usually, for example

Landline £10 / BB £15

You don’t need a landline any more sir!

That’ll be £25

Smoke & mirrors.

That seems so sum it up perfectly!

You're still paying someone, somewhere for the maintenance of a connection to your house. The important bit is not to pay twice!

If you can get full fibre, do that. You can then either switch to a full digital VOIP phone, or use a dongle that converts your existing analog phones to a single VOIP line. The conversion dongles typically won't let you take full advantage of VOIP - no multiple calls, no answering home phone from your mobile.

Once we were happy with VOIP (and mobile as backup) we asked openreach to remove the phone line to the house totally, so there's one bit less overhead clutter.

(Do you really have a choice of different FTTP providers? AIUI that would mean they've dug up the road multiple times)

[Kinky]

normalbloke said:

Take the opportunity to use one of the other providers for FTTP

silentbrown said:

If you can get full fibre, do that. (Do you really have a choice of different FTTP providers? AIUI that would mean they've dug up the road multiple times)

Yeah, have a choice between GigaClear, Trooli and Swish. And yes, the footpaths have been dug up many times. There's a GigaClear green box by the side of my house; and I think it's Swish have their equivalent under a manhole cover outside the front of the house. No idea where Swish have theirs, but when I'm out with the dog I've seen their boxes hanging off some lampposts.

My only reluctance in moving from BT is that I have to be 100% fair to them; their service has been 100% reliable; it's been quite a few years since it went down!!!! And as a home worker (plus a son who is very heavily dependent on it for his private work).

My priorities are Service uptime/reliability and customer service (should it go down). GigaClear seem to fail on these 2 from what I've heard. My local councillor just posted something on our local FB group about Trooli, so I asked her how she's found them in the past ~18 months; and her response: "Very stable, never had an outage, so impressed especially after switching from BT!"

A neighbour signed up with Gigaclear a few months ago and his feedback was "down side was maintenance which left me with no service between 10pm and 6am on 2 or 3 nights. To be fair they did give clear notice ahead of time."

Just need to research the 3 of them and see who comes out best. I was told by a fellow PHer that BT FTTP won't be available here locally until late 2025.

Of course, happy for any PH inputs. I've no brand loyalty either way.

[richhead]

amazes me why phone companies are spending so much on this stuff, it will all be obsolite in a year or two anyway once the mobile networks catch up, it just seems like old tech to me, and a waste of money, most people dont need a billion mb a sec and can happily do with a mobile signal, that would save one bill a month.