Risk of moving line-rental from BT to your ISP?

After 12months argument between aky and bt I moved totally to sky. Any future issues will then be dealt with by sky only. It was in the end bt's fault and after conversations with both CEO's they sortes it and pais compensation. I would doubt any phone provider would not have a 'maintenance' element. I would say keep it all with one supplier if possible for rhis reason and cost benefits

You can pay your line rental annually with BT. It's £129 a year, equivalent to £10.75 a month.

Most of the providers have line rental savers these days.

IME you're better off putting all your eggs in one basket with phone and broadband. I've had terrible trouble getting faults fixed in the past when i had phone and b/band from seperate companies with neither company wanting to take ownership of the fault.

As for repair charges, everything upto the master socket is the responsibility of whoever you pay line rental to and you won't incur charges for any line faults upto that point

Any extensions/wiring etc belong to you and are your responsibility, so if an engineer attends and the fault is on your wiring/extensions you would be charged. It's why they fit master sockets with removable front plates with a test point behind, as removing it isolates your wiring from the providers.

So not sure where you got the info about other providers not including a maintenance element, but its utter cobblers.

Thanks for the responses. Think I'll give Talk Talk a ring tonight and see what they can do for me.

I'm not finding it now, but it was from Tiscali's support forum (now Talk Talk). A customer had his broadband + calls + line-rental through Tiscali, but when he phoned Tiscali to report a fault with the phone line, Tiscali said maintenance wasn't covered he would have to ring BT. So he rang BT who said that because he no longer paid line rental to them (which included a maintenance element) he would be charged £80ph to repair the line. Quite a few people chipped-in saying they'd fallen victim of the same loophole, not just Tiscali customers but customers of other ISPs as well.
This was a just before the Tiscali takeover by Talk Talk, so hopefully the loophole is now closed. I will certainly seek clarification with Talk Talk when I phone them tonight.
Thank you for your input.

Ah, with Tiscali/AOL/TT you could well be right. CPW are a law unto themselves.

Appalling company, IME.

Twenty minutes on the phone to an asian call-centre and I *think* I've been given all the reassurances I need.  So I've gone for it.

There's a guy coming round on 06 February to upgrade me to fibre-optic.  I'm hoping I can keep my existing Netgear modem; it's taken me ages to get it set-up exactly how I like it, and I shouldn't imagine the freeby-modem they're giving me with the contract will be up to much.

I get You View as well and a set-top box, but considering the problems some people seem to be having with it, I won't expect much from it.  I'm just looking at it from the perspective that If it works it's a bonus lol.

Does your modem have a WAN port and support PPPoE or is it just an ADSL 'router' with an intergrated modem?

As BTOR will fit an new faceplate to the Master socket (that has two sockets - a filtered socket for the phone and unfiltered for the modem, so no need for microfilters) and a fibre modem.

So your ISP needs to provide or you need a router that has a WAN port to connect to the BTOR modem with ethernet , if it's an ADSL 'router' it won't have one as it has an intergrated modem and connects to the filter with RJ11 type cable.

If the TT router is anything like as bad as the router supplied by Plusnet (which is actually an ADSL router running custom f/w to convert one of the LAN ports to WAN) then you're better off sourcing your own.

No it doesn't have that, it's just an ADSL modem/router, though it does have a PPPoE bridge mode which it calls Relay Mode. (Netgear DGN 2200)

Not 100% sure, but i think PPPoE bridge mode, basically just configures it in adsl modem only. ie PPPoE session and routing duties etc would need be handled by another device.

You could probably still use it as an AP/DHCP server etc but that would mean 3 boxes instead of two.

I think I'd see how good/bad the TT router is first then replace with a decent one if need be.

Thank Dave, I'll just see how it goes.  I appreciate your input, as I can easily tell you know way more than I do about it.

I'm irrationally fastidious with my home LAN, but I'm no power user.  For example all our computers and devices have fixed IPs so I can easily communicate with them via RDM+ and VLC. But to be honest, I don't need a great deal more than that function.  Surely any router will give me that these days.

I thought that until PN supplied me with their technicolor router (hopefully TT supply something better).

I'm not a power user either tbh, but need/use basic functions like dynamic dns updating, fixed IPs and port forwarding to allow remote access to devices on my network, which are all basic and simple to set-up on any router I've previously used.

But not the technicolor, it was a PITA to configure and would return to default settings every time it rebooted + its wireless performance was abysmal.

Thanks for the warning.  I'll have to see what it comes with then. If it turns out to be a bag of poo, what router would you recommend, based on the fact that my (I thought very basic) needs are broadly similar to yours? The only brand I vowed I'd never touch again is Belkin, but I suppose I'll begrudgingly think about it if they make one which is an obvious market-leader.

EDIT: actually it looks like they'll be giving me one of these: 

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2012/05/talktalk-uk-isp-trial-revea...

No idea what its like.
But looks like another quality router from a well known brand just like technicolor .

I ended up buying an Asus 'Dark Night' RT-66U.

As i wanted a dual band simultaneous/concurrent router with gigabit ethernet + decent WiFi range/throughput, as i often transfer large files to various devices across my network and there's 5 of us, often using the internet simultaneously with lots of HD streaming etc.

It's an excellent router, but quite expensive.

At the budget end, TP-Link are gaining a name for themselves and getting lots of good reviews.

Cheers, thanks.  I'll just have to see how it goes.