darkstar wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 10:55am:


If I only need the line maintained for broadband use then why do I have to pay towards subsidising the cost of calls on a BT call package (BT Option 1) at a lower level than their cost effective market rate for those calls.  There used to be something called BT Standard that only cost £8.50 per month and also came with over £2 a month of call allowance that was abolished on 1st July 2004.

Now we have to subscribe to one of BT's discount call packages to have broadband, even if we don't want to make any calls with BT. How is that fair.

So as line rental is now £11 per month then even allowing for inflation over 2 years we are paying £4 per month extra (factoring in the lost free monthly call allowance on BT Standard) if we only need broadband to prop up the discounting of calls on the BT Option schemes.

darkstar wrote on Jan 16^th, 2007 at 11:12pm:


Why should BT levy £33 per quarter on its miserable 20 year old copper wire while the gas, electricity and water companies only levy £5 to £10 per quarter standing charge.  Those big electricity pylons and electricity sub stations and water mains and reservoirs all look more expensive to me to maintain than a few phone switches and light guage overhead copper cables that don't electrocute anybody or get contaminated like water does.

What BT charges for line rental is all based on a quite fictitious valuation of its ancient copper wire network which the fools at Ofcom allowed.  That copper network won't be worth anything once WiMax gets going properly in two or three years time.

BT has a monopoly on rural phone networks.  Why should it be able to levy exorbitant charges to maintain its inefficient and overmanned staffing structure with old technology that could have been modernised and replaced with far less manpower intensive systems of maintenance years ago.

If I had a choice other than using BT Wholesale/OpenReach's service then your argument that I could shop around might hold.  But I have to prop up BT to get a broadband service.

Gas and electricity operators all have no standing charge tariffs.  If you only use £5 per quarter gas or electricity standing charge that is all you pay.  And its entitely feasible that remote garages or little used country cottages may only use that per quarter,

Why does BT not have a no standing charge phone tariff when I don't even make phone calls with it.  Becaue OfCon doesn't force it to.

Of course your masters claims it costs them all this money to maintain their network just like Balfour Beatty tried to claim they didn't cause the Hatfield rail crash.  The reality is that phone line rental and broaband charges by BT Wholesale are where the company makes most of its money.  It doesn't make anything to speak of out of 01/02 phone calls I can tell you.

Of course that's why BT pushed 0845/0870 calls so much, which Ofcom in whom you seem to have so much faith but are in fact in the pockets of the telcos, allowed to explode out of control.

We the line rental customers are not paying for the lines that are there now but for BT to invest in its 21st century network to fend off WiMax.  But we the customers should only be paying for the old phone lines we use and BT's shareholders ought to be paying for that investment and taking the risk.

You refer to the Wholesale cost of the phone line as being £9.  That £9 comes from Bt Wholesale another operating division of BT.  The fact that other utilities like water, gas and electricity have far lower standing charges for much the same kind of infrastructure makes it self evident to me that BT Wholesale's wholesale line rentals costs to BT Retail are far above BT Wholesale's actual costs in operating and maintaining the lines.

If you are just going to be rude when you only have a few posts in the forum to your credit then I don't think there's much point in continuing the conversation.  To be honest in your thinking patterns you demonstrate to me that you are a typical call centre worker.  I know the breed all too well - they always refuse to make their own rational deductions from any given set of facts and instead want the deductions to all be fed to them by somebody else just like an on screen call script..........

Crap, my apologies for my horrid spelling. I would I was drunk but I just cannot spell.

No, I actually vote Lib Dem if you must know, but thats by the by.

But again, show me why its NOT £9pcm, give some shred of proof why it doesnt, anything,or  say WHY a company shouldnt make money, or go away. PLEASE do one of the first as you seem to do good stuff on this forum. But knowing about 0845/0870 doesnt make you an expert on all things involved in telecoms. I again have to say that I make my comments based on the evidence in front of me, NOT SPECULATION.

Oh, and ready to drop the personal attacks yet? You may want to check Godwins law as well.

bbb_uk wrote on Jan 17^th, 2007 at 2:55pm:


But in the last 10 years I have been here BT have had over £1,000 in line rental from me but have not yet had to fix a single line fault on my phone line as it has never been disconnected.

Compare this with electricity for which I pay just £5 per quarter standing charge and have had to complain about repeated frequent 1 second outages (caused by overhead wires touching trees on their poorly routed overhead lines) on numerous occasions and EDF Energy (and predecessors) have had to spend a lot of money attending to the network to fix this (far more than the £200 or so I have paid in standing charge).  Also last Thursday a tree fell down on one of the local cross country village feeds and they took six and a half hours to reconnect us and had men working till midnight under arc lights in the middle of a field.

If your power is off the network operator usually works 24/7 until the fault is fixed but if your BT line goes down they usually start work in the morning on the next working day which is Tuesday if its the Thursday evening before Easter.

And I also pay BT Wholesale/Openreach again to keep their miserable thin copper wire up to standard and their line card at the exchange maintained as part of my broadband service too.   BT are by far the most expensive utility because they are hideously inefficient and employ large numbers of call centre staff making a mess of administering pointless schemes like Friends & Family which are designed to protect BT jobs while not giving you the discount promised.  They have far too many expensive UK based call jockeys who could be eliminated by an entirely internet based interface with most customers.

The problem is really that the price of call is artificially low because the companies routing the calls do not have to pay the real cost of accessing the network each time which includes maintaining it so the call routes.  Unfortunately this is all collected through flat rate line rental for the phone system which is very unfair to those on lower incomes who do not qualify for the Light User Scheme (that is that almost everybody on low income who is not old doesn't qualify for the Light User Scheme as broadband on the line is incredibly not allowed).  It would seem to me much fairer if people used the phone network a lot paid more to use it as does happen with electricity, gas and water.  The current model for paying for maintenance of the network is a bit mad as it doesn't relate to the amount you use it at all.  And even if I make my calls with 18185 surely BT still get something on each call for being the OCP to 18185s call routing access point?