Why you don't need a landline
As providers up their phone line rental charges, skip the price rise by ditching your landline altogether.
Customers of TalkTalk, Sky and BT all face a hike in the cost of their phone line rental on 1st December.
BT customers will pay the most – £16.99 a month, compared to £11.25 just five years ago.
The predicament for many households is that although they might not use their landline for phone calls, preferring to use their mobile phone instead, they need a phone line to get broadband.
However, there are an increasing number of broadband options which don’t require a landline.
Fibre optic broadband
If you live in a cable broadband area you can get Virgin Media broadband without a landline – and it’s fast too.
Up to 50Mb costs £26.50 a month, up to 100Mb costs £31.50 and up to 152Mb will set you back £39 a month.
Other providers such as BT and Sky also offer fibre optic broadband – but you need a landline.
Another option is a company called Hyperoptic. Hyperoptic broadband is what's known as fibre to the premises (FTTP) broadband.
This means it uses fibre optic cable and nothing else to connect you to the internet and so doesn’t require a landline.
Some rival fibre optic services such as BT Infinity use fibre optic cable up to the cabinet in your street, then connect you to the internet using your phone line. This means it’s a bit slower and, crucially, you still need a landline.
Hyperoptic deals include 20Mb for £22.50 a month, 100Mb for £35 and a gigantic 1Gig for £60.
However, it’s not available everywhere and could work out more expensive than paying for a line rental and broadband with some providers.
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Relish
Newcomer Relish, part of UK Broadband, boasts you can “get online without the landline”. It uses the 4G network to deliver broadband to people’s homes.
As well as not needing a landline you don’t need an engineer to install it either: you can just “plug and play” the day after you place an order.
Relish works via an “indoor hub” which connects up to 25 WiFi-enabled devices, plus two network ports for a wired connection.
It’s cheaper than fibre optic broadband too and there’s a minimum one-month contract. Up to 50Mb costs £20 a month for unlimited use.
Relish also offers deals combining home broadband and mobile broadband via a “pocket hub”. For example, home broadband plus 1GB of mobile broadband costs £25 upfront and £25 a month.
Although Relish competes with landline and broadband bundles on price, the main downside is its availability. It launched in central London in June and plans to expand across the capital and to other parts of the UK.
Dongles
Relish isn’t the only company to offer 4G routers, also known as dongles, pocket hubs or MiFi devices. Three, Vodafone, O2, Virgin Media and EE now offer a range of cheap deals. Plug in and get cheap mobile broadband on the go.
However, they tend to be more expensive than Relish and come with download limits.
For example, EE’s 4G plans offers up to 60Mb broadband, costs £59.99 to set up and £30 a month, and has a data limit of 25Gb per month.
Vodafone’s 4G plan is free to set up, offers speeds up to 40Mb and has a download limit of 8GB a month. It costs £26 a month on a 12-month contract.
There are some cheaper deals available but make sure you double check what you get for your money.
For example, Three offers a 3G (not 4G) plan that’s free to set up, £7.87 a month, and offers speeds up to 21Mb and a download limit of 1Gb a month. Customers are tied in for two years.
Satellite
SES Broadband Services offers Astra Connect, a service which it says offers a “high-speed Internet connection wherever you live”.
It offers services via four service providers in the UK: Apogee Internet, EuropaSat, Satellite Internet, and Broadband Everywhere.
However, satellite internet is really a last resort due to the price of the necessary hardware. For example, set up costs with Broadband Everywhere are £450.
Do the sums
It’s important to do the maths before ditching your landline.
In many cases, opting for broadband that doesn’t need a landline can work out more expensive than just bundling in your line rental with your broadband.
However, if the big players continue their approach of hiking line rental prices every year (and sometimes more than once), that may well change.
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