can someone explain phone line rental / broadband etc with different suppliers please?

[BellevilleRendezvous]

I can't work out if I can save more money or not ... I have a BT landline rental, which it seems comes with a weekend calls package - doesn't seem possible to not have a calls package.

I also have Sky+ Talk Surf and erm Watch? package ie sky broadband, satellite dish and box, and phone calls.

Both sky and BT are forever telling me that I should switch and get a better deal than with the other ...

Do I have to have a BT landline to get Sky broadband? Does anyone know how the calls packages work and if there is money-saving potential on either side? Help!

A few ISPs use LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) which means they rent the line from BT Wholesale and then charge the end user (such as yourself) a line rental fee, sometimes lower than BT charges.

A lot depends (in your case) whether the exchange has Sky broadband equipment installed.

If it does, then making a transfer to Sky may make sense, depending on how much data your household uses.

If you visit Samknows and enter your phone number you can see whether Sky is listed in the right-hand column under LLU.

If it is, then their broadband offering will be cheaper. If they have no kit at the exchange, they put a customer on their 'Connect' package for an extra tenner (to cover cost of using BT's network from the exchange).

The LLU thing could be a bit of a red herring....

My local exchange doesn't support LLU, however I rent my phoneline from Sky and could (though I don't) get my broadband from them too.

I'm not too sure exactly what advantages LLU gives the consumer, possibly faster broadband, but the lack of it doesn't mean that you don't have a choice of line and broadband providers.

The money saving potential depends on exactly what you use your phone for, different companies offer different packages and it will be incredibly personal to you which one is best.

The 'default' with BT is to have 'free' weekend calls (a few years ago you could get line rental without having 'Option 1' and paying the extra for it. They changed their base rental package to include weekends and pushed the cost up 2 (?) pounds.

From October 2010 the BT line rental goes up another 50p a month. Other companies might follow suit (as it is likely the 'wholesale' cost will be pushed up by a similar level).

Which calls package you find best depends again on how much usage you make. BT and others bank on the fact a family will find it easy to pay a lump sum, which they are happy to take even when everyone's situation changes and they're at home less, or on holiday or whatever.

As you have Sky Talk, the BT free weekend calls are unlikely to be used at all (I think Sky Talk becomes the default for all calls - it's called Carrier Pre-Select, and you'd need to dial a code like 1260 to force a call back to BT).

I use 1899.com (my line rental is with BT) to make calls - 5p flat fee for connection, then 0p/minute - spoke to my eldest sister for 2 hours yesterday night (marathon, she had lots to say, and I can be a patient listener)... I rang her back as I don't think she has the 'evenings and weekends' calls deal, so it would have cost her a small fortune, but it's not ideal in a family situation as I needed to dial 1899 and then her full number.

The LLU saving is that the ISP doesn't pay BT for access (and per GB) of data over the BT network.

O2/Be There, Sky/Easynet, Orange, and others, have their own fibre to exchanges, and newer DSLAMs so can do more remote diagnostics/ control than if they are just renting access from BT.

BT seems to be fitting FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) in areas where O2/ Sky are active, because other ISPs have been offering "up to 20 Mbps" or "up to 24 Mbps" and BT has only recently (with C21 installations) been offering "up to 20 Mbps", but will (with FTTC) be able to offer 15 to 40 Mbps.

It's not a red herring that the ISP pays less to BT Wholesale - they pay for setting up only, and it's why firms have been offering 200, 300, 400, 500 GB of traffic a month (which they would never do via BT Wholesale as intermediary).

For BellevilleRendezvous - If you have the line with BT, then are you being charged more than a tenner for your broadband service (ie Connect) ?

Looked into exactly what Sky can offer me and at the moment I can get : "up to 8Mb* download speeds and a monthly usage allowance of 40GB. "

So it seems that with Sky you can get better deals, an unlimited broadband connection, if your exchange does have LLU.

But they will still provide Broadband regardless.

So just try a few of the providers out, give them your phone number and see what you get...

BP - if you visit the SamKnows site (link in an earlier post) it will show which LLU services are present on your exchange.

It cuts down the search for alternatives (where they may offer no service at all - not all will offer an alternative via BT, as Sky does).

Without knowing the OP's exchange it is awkward to suggest whether any alternative would be worth considering.

If Sky reduces the cost of the TV package for those using extra services, it may be best to stick with them. However there are other deals in some cases - O2 customers get a reduction on O2 broadband, and you can be an O2 customer (PAYG, costing 10 quid top-up each quarter) without having a mobile contract. Orange may offer a reduction on broadband and line rental for mobile customers.

all these phone packages depend on how much you ring abroad/mobiles/0845 etc numbers rather than UK landlines.

If you have a reasonable mobile packageyou can use that to ring other mobs, & also landlines, using your built-in allowances, but not 08xxx which cost a fortune.

0845 etc (eg 0800/0870/0840/other 08xx numbers/probably 03xx too) are probably cheaper via BT but you need to read all the small print v v carefully. With BT 08xxx calls are mostly negligible if not free, esp after 7pm & at weekends, but some aren't.

Foreign calls are generally cheaper via 1899/18185/18866/whatever.

hello, just come back to this - lots to read through so will have a proper look tomorrow. thanks for all the info, very helpful.

(We have basic BT at £15pm which includes free 0845/0870 calls evenings & weekends, & AOL broadband at about £13pm)

"I'm not too sure exactly what advantages LLU gives the consumer, possibly faster broadband, but the lack of it doesn't mean that you don't have a choice of line and broadband providers."

No, without LLU you have no choice of line provider. In a non-LLU environment, your line runs to a splitter in the exchange and thence to a port on a voice switch and a port on a broadband multiplexer. From there your broadband runs over BT's network to where it's handed off to your ISP in one of their data centres. BT are paid for the wholesale services all the way, and all your ISP is providing is billing, branding and peering out to the Internet at large.

In a LLU environment, either your line runs to a splitter with the voice handed off to BT's voice equipment and the broadband handed off to your ISP's equipment ("shared metallic path facility") or in some rare cases your voice and broadband are connected to your ISP's equipment ("metallic path facility"). Leaving voice to one side, from the exchange your data is immediately on your ISP's network.

In non-LLU, you can only be offered the services BT have in the exchange, and your ISP is only able to backhaul the data via whatever BT have available. In LLU, the only thing BT provide for your broadband is the copper, the patchframe and in some cases the splitter, everything else comes from the ISP. So if the ISP wants to offer ADSL 2+, VDSL or what have you, then subject to the band plan they're free to do so.

"No, without LLU you have no choice of line provider."

I do not have LLU.

I do not pay my line rental to BT.

Behind the scenes there must be some deal where Sky pay BT for my line, but to me that's pretty invisible. As a consumer I can go to other companies and say "I want you to provide my broadband and I want to pay my line rental to you."

Now LLU seems to be "nice", I could get faster broadband and better capacity with it. However because I don't have it doesn't mean that I should just settle with BT, and I haven't.

If I trusted that SamKnows site alone I could come away with the impression that I have no choice other than BT as they are the only listed company at my local exchange. That's not true and could lead someone to make very uninformed choices about their line and broadband provision.

So regardless of what the SamKnows site says you can and should look elsewhere for your service providers.

There's a whole assemblage of equipment and services involved in broadband. In non-LLU environments, the vast majority of it comes from BT.

As you realise, Sky are paying BT Wholesale for a wholesale broadband service on your behalf, but they're just an intermediary. A powerful intermediary, though: if BT screw you around as a direct customer, it's just you v them, whereas if BT screw Sky around on your behalf that's the sort of thing Ofcom take a very dim view of.

But it's BT's copper, BT's exchange equipment and BT's backhaul from the exchange. The operation of that equipment is BT's call, and all your ISP can do is choose from the menu of options. Samknows started out as a survey of line speeds, and in a non-LLU environment, the synch speed between the exchange and the customer will be independent of the customer's choice of operator.

In the case of LLU, the copper's (usually) BT's, but everything else is the LLU operator's. That means that they can offer something fundamentally different to BT (O2's LLU offering is very different to BT's) and the line speed may vary quite radically with different engineering trade-offs and/or willingness to mess about to get the last few percent.

And other stuff: BT won't, last time I checked, sell ADSL 2+ Annex M as a wholesale product, whereas O2 have it as an option on some of their residental packages: if you find slow uploading frustrating, you might be willing to trade 2Mbps of downstream for an extra 0.5Mbps of upstream, and O2 can offer that choice in LLU. O2 will all sell you service in exchanges where they don't have LLU, but they can't offer Annex M.

I'm not arguing against LLU at all.

What I am saying is that the SamKnows does not tell you who you can get as a phone and broadband provider (from a consumers point of view, that is who they pay the bills to).

It can highlight if you have some choices of LLU provision but you still have a whole lot of other non-LLU options that they don't seem to list.

I would just hate for someone to see that SamKnows page for their exchange, see BT listed as their only option with every other provider having a big cross by them and think that therefore they have to stick with BT.

You're right. Are people really using Samknows as a buyers' guide like that? If so, that's bad.

this is what happens when technologically illiterate people like me post on this board!

Glad I didn't post my other two part completed ones then! Oh, and for BP - who uses (or even suggests) using SamKnows for consumer choice of ISPs? It's a site with technical info in summary form which is just a convenient collection of info that doesn't seem to be available anywhere else.

For user choice I'd suggest www.net4now.com (previously net4nowt when it was set up with 0845 dial-up ISPs), ISPreview.co.uk and ThinkBroadband.com (previously ADSLguide.org.uk)

There are, of course, quite a number of other websites, but the majority work on a commission basis (up to 50 pounds per signup) and are therefore limited in what they even list. A number have approached me to use domains I have registered to point to them, with no cash coming my way (but I wouldn't play ball with them, and certainly won't give them publicity by naming them).

Unfortunately too many 'comparison sites' gain credibility by associating themselves with some of the media (eg newspaper web sites). With the numbers of loyal readers and the fact they think the newspaper is trustworthy, they are given the idea they get a good deal, while the newspaper and comparison site get cash for selling them a service that may well not be ideal or best value for their needs.