Odd question for this forum but the internet has failed to give me a good answer so here goes!

Just moved house and trying to setup phone/internet. The house currently has a BT line connected but stopped apparently. The landlord has asked me to confirm that at the end of the tenancy the phone line will be left in a similar state and that the he or the next tenants won't be lumped with a large re-connection fee if I go to a different service provider. This leaves me with a slight issue as I want to go with a different provider for phone/net/line-rental but can't get them to confirm the line can be left in such state at contract end when we leave the place.

Does anyone know if this is a reasonable request or whether he doesn't need to worry about it due to the connection fee being minimal/none existent?

Help appreciated.

Andy!

[Edited on 17/8/12 by andylancaster3000]

What other provider are you considering?

Besides virgin the vast majority of providers use a BT line anyway so it would not physically change and therere would be no reconnectino fee. Sky has started making things more complicated in recent years by using what it claims are Sky ohone lines, but are in fact BT too.

If you are going for virgin then you have nothing to worry about. The BT line won't be touched or used by Virgin.

Rich

The only provider I know who would make a complete hash job of it and require the big connection fee is Talk Talk. I don't know what they do, but I had to pay to get my line back to BT after I'd have enough of them. Which was annoying because I was moving to Sky, so I had to have 12 months minimum contract on the BT phone line before I could switch.

You may not be able to get confirmation from the new provider, but you might get some confirmation from BT if you phone up and ask them how much it would be? Just say something like 'I am moving to a house that used to have xyz provider, what could you offer me to move to BT'.

As said above it talk talk it can be expensive but others like sky (in my area) use the same lines from openreach so it shouldn't be a problem. Can't they (new supplier) confirm if they use a standard BT exchange or if they use their own equipment.
Pete

Thanks for the comments guys. I think I will just make sure I will use a BT-lined service provider and explain to him that it 'shouldn't' be a problem at contract end.

Re. the provider: I was going to go with talktalk (who do use a BT line) but having read comments above I now feel less inclined. Are they really that bad? They currently say now connection re will be charged to the customer.

[Edited on 17/8/12 by andylancaster3000]

Talk talk in my experience were Ok when it worked and then the support was terrible thats after the wait of about 45minutes on hold. They don't use BT lines in a lot of cases as they have unbundled many exchanges and put their own equipment in.

We've been on Talk Talk about 3 years now and not had any major problems with connection only a couple of hours down in all that time and we were paying £40+ for phone and broadband before but with TT it has never gone over £23. They run their own LLU from the local exchange but the wires to the house are the same and when we took their offer connection was not expensive. 2 months savings on bills covered it easily.

The test of any telecoms provider/ISP is how quickly & how well they respond when things go wrong.

I was with Talk Talk for several years. Basically they were ok until something went wrong. Then they messed me around for over 2 weeks before realizing that they had blocked my line, instead of someone else's with a similar name. The other person was in Newcastle, and I am several hundred miles away in Norwich!

No apology, no offer of compensation so I left them and went to Plus Net. Absolutely the best service I've ever had from a provider.

I renewed with PlusNet a couple of months ago. They were very keen on keeping customers and told me to look around for the best deal, then they would beat it.

I have paid 12 months line rental up front (at £9 ish per month) now my bill for Broadband, plus free evening and weekend calls will be less than £4 per month, guaranteed for 12 months.

Plusnet are excellent they actually try to fix problems quickly.
Plusnet are owned by BT but run as a completely independant outfit, but unlike other ISP/telcoms are not slow to call in BT to check for line faults.