http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35869222

This is much more about the coordinated attack on BT, the likes of which I've never seen before. They even took out a full page advertisement when Team Shapps stuck the boot in. I fully expect the real story to turn up in Private Eye.

Do you pay for the landline separately from the broadband service? It is unclear from the article.

Over here, the "line rental" is a combined line/broadband fee - I pay 30€ for 50mbps broadband and flat rate telephone calls to landlines and mobiles. The "line rental" falls under providing broadband.

Incidentally, there are no more "telephone" lines here. ISDN is being phased out in business and 98% of private households have already been moved over to VOIP - if you wanted ADSL over here, you needed to get ISDN, but the ISDN manufacturers are stopping support of the equipment in 2018, so the telecoms companies have until next year to convert all existing business and private lines to pure VOIP lines.

My landline charge is separate from the BB package. If they get rid of that I'm sure they'll just roll it into the BB price.

Exactly.

I have neighbours who had to cough up for a phone line to get BB, and they don't have a telephone - seems a little harsh that they pay the same for line rental as I do.

TBH, I'd ditch my landline if the mobile reception in my house wasn't so spotty - I never get anywhere near the allotted minutes on my mobile.

A small number of BB companies do have BB only line rental (I know Andrews and Arnold do) but it doesn't seem to much cheaper than it would be if there was an associated voice service.

If the landline charge is eliminated the cost will just be rolled into something else as you still need the physical line for most types of broadband service.

I suspect that landline calls are an increasingly small part of most companies portfolios these days anyway.
Was seriously unimpressed by Zen's recent changes to their phones package - 'simplified' pricing that's basically a massive price hike (between 300 and 1000% (depending on when you signed up) for off-peak landline calls which is the only thing I use) to everything except mobile calls. I don't think I'll be using my landline for anything but incoming calls in future. Time to get some more minutes on my mobile contract me thinks.

The voice call part of landline service is a negligible cost to any modern telco . The cost of building the network has long been written off and the connectivity kit is massively commoditised. Seriously for your average residential user the cost of providing landline voice is a fraction of a penny a month and the idea of charging per call is ludicrous, the cost of recording the call has happened costs more than servicing the call. Maintenance costs on the network raise it to a couple of pence a month when spread over millions of users.

Line rental is simply a thing telcos are happy to continue to insist on because free money. It bears no relation to providing the service as it currently costs. They could happily charge what they currently charge for a broadband service for both, but as I say why turn down £10/month/customer in revenue that's almost pure profit unless you're forced to?