KCOM Scraps Rental Charges for Landline Phone Handsets

The incumbent phone and broadband ISP for Hull and East Yorkshire, KCOM, has announced that they’re ending rental charges for landline phone handsets from 1st November 2019. Instead the ownership of such devices will be switched to the customer or, alternatively, it’s suggested that they could chuck it (recycling centre).

The idea of renting out phone handsets for a regular fee is not one we’ve seen many other operators offer (it’s not like ordinary handsets are expensive – you can grab one up for under £10), although apparently KCOM has been doing it for 115 years.

Meanwhile the recent completion (here) of their new “full fibre” (FTTP) network, as well as the ever reducing usage of home phones for making calls, does however makes this seem like a dated practice. As such we can easily understand the move to abandon it.

Obviously this means that affected customers will now be “responsible for any issues with the phone such as if it needs repairing or replacing” (Hull Daily Mail).

A KCOM Spokesperson said:

“We have decided to stop offering phone handsets for rent from 1 November. This means customers will own their handsets outright and save money by no longer paying a monthly rental fee.

It also means customers will be responsible for repairing or replacing their own handsets if there is a fault.”

Until today we didn’t even know that KCOM offered such a service, although we suspect that not many of their customers were using it. Otherwise we’d be quite interested to know how much KCOM charged for this and precisely what handset(s) they supplied; we suspect the answer is in one or both of these price documents here and here.