who needs a landline anyway?

Your current situation may look something like this… you have broadband, probably fibre, and you’re paying for a package that includes a landline where there may not be a phone plugged in, and you probably don’t know what your home phone number is! Sound familiar?

According to Uswitch data, “the number of households with a landline has fallen by 4 million since 2000” and “4 in 5 homes have a landline, but more than a quarter don’t have a handset attached.” All just going to show that our digital world is consuming more and more analogue technologies.

Historically, when buying broadband, it has been compulsory to bundle in line rental. But with the majority of us using our mobile phones, and the dawn of 100% internet-based calls, why do we need to pay for line rental? And do we really need it?

how can I have broadband without a phone line?

At the time of writing this blog, most broadband providers use the Openreach network to bring the internet to our homes, often via copper cabling. Similarly with fibre broadband; the fibre cables run to the green cabinet in your street, but the journey into the home is completed via copper cables. Where this is the case, the connection will not be delivered over 100% fibre. 

What’s more, where ‘traditional’ broadband packages are taken (using a combination of fibre and copper in a connection), line rental can often be tied into your contract… 

But what if you don’t need line rental as you don’t use a landline? And you don’t want part-fibre or ADSL (copper) internet?

A full-fibre broadband provider, like toob, can help to move away from copper lines and on to 100% fibre broadband. Full-fibre is separate from the phone network and uses its own fibre optic network to bring faster speeds, better reliability and lower latency (ping), all directly to your home. Full-fibre is a superior technology which is produced intentionally for data transmission, which copper networks were never designed for. 

why choose broadband without a phone line?

Choosing full-fibre as a ‘broadband only’ option, will increase your broadband speeds dramatically, giving your home the bandwidth it needs to cope with modern daily life; whether you’re gaming, streaming, using smart devices, surfing or working from home. Other benefits include: 

saving money on your broadband bills 

toob’s full-fibre costs just £25 per month, meaning you can hang up the phone on copper networks and benefit from no line rental or additional charges. 

reliability 

toob delivers 900 Mbps download and upload speeds; making your internet experience more streamlined and more reliable, no matter how many people at home are online at the same time. 

less maintenance and interference 

Old copper phone lines can slow your internet down. 

Then consider phone calls. The majority of us now use mobile phones and internet-based apps. But that’s not to say there aren’t options available if you want full-fibre as well as your landline… 

what are the alternatives to a landline?

A BBC survey has revealed that: “40% of us in the UK have stopped using a landline altogether.” Most of us are now using our mobile phones for calls, however moving away from landlines is still causing some concern.

The great news is that toob is a broadband-only supplier and we help customers who would like to keep their landline through a VOIP service. VOIP stands for ‘Voice Over Internet Protocol’ which basically means a ‘digital home phone.’ 

VOIP services function as a phone line over your broadband connection, so instead of plugging your phone handset into your wall and connecting it to the phone line, you just connect it to the back of your router instead. It’s that simple. 

The benefits of using a VOIP service over traditional landline, include:

• A clearer connection for crystal-clear calls and zero crackly phone lines
• It is often cheaper than the average line rental cost  
• You can keep your landline number
• No more timed calls so you don’t have to hang up at the 59^th minute! Spend as long as you like on the phone to your friends and family

You can take it one step further and download an extension app to your mobile phone, where you can answer your ‘landline’ calls on your mobile, wherever you are!

There are a variety of different VOIP providers, such as Vonage, Sipgate and Virtual Landline.

toob customer Matthew Sleap and his wife have recently joined toob and moved their landline to a VOIP service through Vonage: “It’s Fantastic! It’s a great thing. I don’t even have to stand up to answer the phone, we can just pick up any of the calls on our mobile!”