Household Bills
Thousands of Plusnet customers face increased costs
Plusnet has scrapped its ‘line rental saver’ deal for customers, meaning they can no longer get a discount on line rental costs by paying for the whole year in one go.
The broadband provider had offered the discount deal for a decade before ditching it last week.
The discounted deal meant that customers would only have to pay £213.12 for a year of line rental access. This works out at around £30 a year less than paying for your line rental on a monthly basis.
Importantly, if you are already on a line rental saver deal, then there will be no immediate change. Instead you will switch to paying for your line rental each month once your discount deal ends.
It’s understood that thousands of Plusnet customers make use of the line rental saver discount currently, and the move to ditch the discount has led to some irritated comments on the provider’s customer forums, where one user described the move as “terribly disappointing news”.
A spokesperson for Plusnet said: “We’re always looking at new ways to give our customers simple products with the best value possible, so we’ve replaced Line Rental Saver with more flexible and competitive offers – such as our current 18 month fibre contract for £22.99. This means we can change our offers to suit our customer’s needs but always with the same great value. We’ve contacted our customers to make sure they have all the information they need.”
Do we really need line rental?
Line rental is a frustrating expense for many of us. Having access to a landline is not as important as it once was, with data from Ofcom suggesting that the time we spend speaking on landline phones has more than halved since 2014.
Yet we have to pay for those landlines we never use, simply so that we can make use of a decent broadband connection. A study by comparethemarket.com last year found that as many as eight million households own a landline that they don’t use, and are paying up to £20 a month for the privilege.
However, the growth of fibre to the premises (FTTP) broadband deals may mean that wasting money on line rental you don’t need is coming to an end. These deals use fibre cabling all the way to your home, rather than having to use the existing phone lines, and can elimiate the need to pay for line rental.
