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Or you could set up DD payments and never have to worry about that sort of thing.

You could then safely stay with BT for your (£1 a month cheaper) line rental and not have to worry about being barred from using an alternative call provider like 18866, 1899 etc. for the sake of a saving of a few pence per month.

Well at least it's a start from getting away from the local loop monopoly and maybe other providers will come in and make it even more cheaper.

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You are locked in for 1 year minimum with TalkTalk (otherwise there are penalties for leaving early) and TalkTalk overcharge for 0870 and 0845 compared to BT.

Also speaking as a TalkTalk CPS customer routing almost no calls with them (mainly use 18866) their billing can't be trusted and is highly erratic and flakey.

They can bill for calls that never connected and for calls that you never even ever made on that phoneline.

And their customer service staff are dreadful.  They make even BT customer service staff look like they care!

No one can significantly improve on BT for Line Rental because the useless bas***ds at Ofcom allow BT to sell wholesale line rental at the same retail price more or less that they charge to their own customers.  The same useless bas***ds at Ofcom allow other telcos selling line rental to lock you into making all your calls with them.  This renders any potential savings on line rental massively offset by people like TalkTalk having ripoff prices for international mobiles and for 0845 and 0870.

Move to TalkTalk for cheap billing and line rental at your peril is all I can say.

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The companies who already do and who have in the past offered a Wholesale Line Rental product have all gone for a situation where the only people you can route your calls with are them.  That is that you can't route your calls with 18866, 1899 or even with BT.

My suspicion is that they have to do this because the only way they can afford to offer a lower line headline rental price than BT is by ripping you off with high call costs on which they make a decent profit margin subsequently.

Wholesale Line Rental is Ofcom's idea of competititon but sadly Its not Actually Real Competition as we know it Jim................

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Yes agreed so quite soon you could go for a bargain basement line rental and then make all your outbound calls over broadband via Voip.  But at the moment convenient Voip equipment that can replace all your phones and is easy for all the family to use still isn't quite there yet.

Many seem to be missing the fact that line rental by other than BT was actually available many years ago now.

I was one of the original subscribers to Localtel. That was something of a disaster (at least their billing and customer service was) and eventually they became effectively insolvent.

As others suggest here it is risky at this stage for such a small saving to move from BT for line rental. Hopefully with full unbundling of the LL the situation may eventually change and there could be real savings to be made when other providers are able to tap into the local loop with an external connection service.

Wasn't BT's latest 'Free Caller Display' move a clever ploy? 

There are no on-going costs because their equipment already produces the data anyway and the initial - probably automated - task of switching it on for particular lines is minimal or non-existent.

So they instantly caught the other LR providers out big time - the minimal cost savings on offer were instantly wiped out unless they could follow suit and, AFAIAA, none has (yet).