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BT line

dave47

Member
Can anyone explain what happens to the BT connection after being with Virgin for a couple of years. The BT wire is still attached to the property but the telephone is plugged into the Virgin router. I ask the question because I want to move away from Virgin but because they recently disconnected my phone by mistake I ended up with a new number. Will this cause a problem when I move to a new provider?
 
BT and VM are completely different networks. BT uses copper (or fibre if FTTP) and VM uses Hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC). VM used to have a separate copper cable for the telephone line which was came as a single coaxial + copper cable but they are now moving their telephone service to VOIP so it's now provided digitally via their router. Really the only overlap between BT and VM is that you can port the telephone number in certain situations. If you lost your original number it's likely gone for ever.

It used to be the case that you had to have a telephone line to get broadband using BT's network (Openreach) (ie with ADSL, VDSL and FTTC) but this is no longer the case since BT is also facing out copper telephone lines. So you should probably just get broadband only from your ISP of choice and get a separate VOIP service if you want a regular landline number. That will allow you to keep the VOIP service separate from your broadband service and avoid losing your number when changing ISPs (if the new ISP does not provide a VOIP service for instance).

Mark did a great article on the available VOIP providers in Dec last year and the posibility of migrating an existing number to them:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...ted-home-voip-providers-for-uk-consumers.html

PS: Your BT line will be there as it was. Do check if you can get FTTP as why not move to proper fibre if it is already available. Overwise if you move back to FTTC it should just work once you get reconnected provided the cable/socket is all there.
 
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Here are the BT plans that I can get. You can flip between "Broadband only" and "Broadband & phone" which basically adds £5 for the telephone line. The bottom plans are FTTC and are NOT full fibre. The top plans are FTTP. The Full Fibre 2 deal, the "Superfast deal", is neither superfast nor a deal! As you can see the FTTC plans are really bad value for money, the Full Fibre 2 deal costing £31.99 for 74mb whereas the Full Fibre 500 is £1 cheaper and 6.75x times faster. I some cases BT will not discount the Full Fibre 500 / Full Fibre 900 plans and sell them at "full" price (£44.99 and £54.99). With BT you also need to consider two price rises over the 24 months so probably best to look elsewhere like Vodafone, EE or Giganet.

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Vodafone and EE will have similar price rises as BT, unless OFCOM starts to take action against them, but even then their is likely to be little difference between them.

Giganet appear to have a price promise of no mid-contract price rises.
 
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