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.
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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.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Probably before your time Mark but renting a handset used to be compulsory nationwide if you had a phone line.
My grandparents live in Hull. It was only a year or so ago when switching them to FTTP and saw they were being charged something around £5 for handset rental. They’d been paying it for something like 20 years, and continued to be charged even after tariff switched I’d helped them with previously and when getting a broadband bundle.
I obviously had a pop at them about it and they’d refunded a few years worth of the charges. It’s good they’re getting rid of it but they really have been taking advantage of this situation.
Those were the days of dsl lol, now we’re fully embracing FTTC, FTTP and Gfast.
I’m sure my grandad was charged for his handset from BT until only a few years ago
O think it wasn’t long after I moved home and started living away from family home that I was able to cancel rental and return the handsset in their provided bag… That was early in 1990. I too was shocked to find one sister, who happened to move to the KC patch in last few years, was being charged rental.