We recently renewed our Line Rental Saver deal with BT (for the third year).  We suddenly started getting monthly bills.  I queried this with BT, and apparently the terms and conditions were changed and we have to be billed monthly if we want line rental saver. 

What concerns me is that we have a free BT Privacy service (giving free caller display) from some years back as well as free evening and weekend calls.  But to keep these deals BT have always said "If billed monthly you need to make 2 calls per month or 6 calls a quarter if billed quarterly".  Now we always make many more than 6 calls a quarter.  But we won't be able to make 2 calls each and every month because we sometimes spend more than a month away.  So I'm concerned about (a) the risk of losing the services listed above and (b) the workload in processing monthly rather than quarterly bills.

I complained to BT via their chatline, but they said nothing could be done. I don't recall being told openly about the change to monthly billing and have only discovered this when I wondered why our bills had started arriving monthly. 

So yet other notch in the ratchet as BT continue to try to find ways to put up their prices and get more money in earlier.  If there was any real competition out there I would be switching. But we stay with BT to give us a choice of broadband suppliers.  Just thought I'd see if anyone else has any comments on this one before I write making a formal complaint about such important changes being hidden somewhere in the small print.  WBJB.    :-[

Picking up a couple of points in BB's message.

You don't need to stay with BT for phone in order to have a choice of Broadband suppliers. For example a friend has Post Office phone (as they were doing a good deal at the time) and O2 broadband. Ultimately the phone line coming into your home is provided by BT Openreach (except for Virgin cable) and is rented by the phone and BB suppliers using a number of different schemes.

Workload in processing monthly bills? Most phone and BB companies bill monthly and what's the workload if you're paying by direct debit. With many suppliers paying by DD is either essential or gives a discount. If it's checking the bills and you can't be bothered to do it monthly then check 3 of them every quarter.