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PHONE lines and broadband deals go together like love and marriage.

But, as BT's line rental pushes £14 a month, many of us are finding it's a relationship that's beginning to sour.

The monthly cost of line rental can add hundreds to your broadband bill. Add in the upfront cost of installation, or the price of calls outside your inclusive allowance, and the cost soars even further.

This guide is a one stop shop for repairing your broadband's relationship with line rental: from installing a new line to cutting down on your existing deal.

Starting over
New phone line installation

The vast majority of home broadband deals require a working home phone line.

As we've seen, that comes at a monthly price but if you've moved into a property without a phone line or where the line is seriously damaged in some way there can be a high upfront cost just to get a phone line installed in the first place.

Note that the majority of households won't need an entirely new phone line installed.

In general, if you can plug a home phone into the wall and hear a dial tone you shouldn't need to pay a fee, instead your new phone and broadband provider should be able to transfer the line free of charge.

If you do need a phone line installed, however, signing up for certain broadband deals can make the initial cost of having a phone line installed much cheaper, or even free.

Here are the deals, from the cheapest installation to the most expensive.

• BT's new phone line installation is £0 with any broadband deal
• Post Office's is £0 with any broadband deal (special offer ends 31st March)
• Talk Talk's is £25 (half-price special offer)
• Virgin Media's is £40 with any broadband deal (or £0 with TV)
• Primus' is £69
• O2's is £86.81

Working it out
How to get the cheapest line rental

If it's not that high initial cost that you're avoiding, though, but instead the increasingly prohibitive cost of line rental every month there are solutions to that problem too.

Switching home phone

Budget home phone providers such as Primus can drastically cut the monthly cost of having a home phone.

Bundle broadband and line rental

If you don't do so already, taking a phone line with your existing broadband provider, or vice versa, can also lead to significant savings.

According to Ofcom, last year 56% of households still had a BT phone line (one in five used another supplier) despite the huge range of choice now available from LLU providers.

Many of the broadband providers with some of the UK's highest line rental costs - TalkTalk and Sky, for example - don't allow their broadband customers to take line rental with a different provider so switching from their deals could save a lot overall, even when the initial cost of broadband elsewhere appears to be higher.

See our guide to the cheapest broadband and phone for more deals.

PAYG line rental

O2 and Be broadband are the only line rental providers to offer PAYG line rental.

The deals, available for their exclusively for their broadband customers, don't include any inclusive calls so they're the cheapest line rental deals.

BT Basic

BT Basic is among the UK's cheapest line rental, offered to those on a low income or facing financial difficulties.

Unfortunately, although this is one of the cheapest line rental packages around for those who make very few outgoing phone calls, BT don't allow it to be used with broadband connections.

Cutting costs without switching

On the other hand, it's perfectly possible to cut home phone costs without moving provider.

Keeping calls inclusive

Even with only moderate landline use, for example, a line rental deal which offers inclusive calls will generally work out cheaper than PAYG or making calls outside inclusive times

In fact, BT claim that it's the increasing tendency for households never to make non-inclusive phone calls that has led to them putting the cost of line rental up in the first place.

For that reason, it's worth double checking your phone provider's peak times as many have changed them recently and this could be down to any particularly large bills you've incurred lately.

BT, Sky and TalkTalk's peak time ends at 7pm, for example.

Virgin Media and Primus start theirs at 6pm.

Pay by direct debit

Paying by direct debit can really cut down on the monthly cost of line rental as well as saving you from extra costs if a payment is missed.

With most providers this and opting for paperless billing can save at least a few pounds a month and with some it's more like five.

Pay upfront

Another option, increasingly widely available after these latest round of price hikes on line rental, is paying upfront for a 12 month period.

With BT, for example, this reduces the effective monthly price of line rental to £10.

TalkTalk's Value phone line option, which offers the same thing, is £9.50 a month.

Time to break up?
Broadband without a phone line

Finally, as the price of line rental increases, going phone free has never looked so tempting.

It can seem like a big jump to rely solely on mobiles but it's one an increasing number of households are making. Ofcom report that 15% of households now do without a home phone line, up from just 7% in 2000.

Unfortunately, there's only one provider currently offering home broadband without a phone line: Virgin Media.

Virgn Media can offer landline-free broadband because they're providing a fibre service rather than using, at any stage, the ordinary Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) which must be active for most broadband services to work.

Even with Virgin Media, however, going land line free comes with a price.

Compared with Virgin Media deals that bundle broadband with their £13.90 line rental, the land line free deals are just £5 a month cheaper with L broadband and just £3 less expensive with faster deals.

Contracts last for eighteen months.

Availability

The other big problem is with availability.

Virgin Media's cable network lies outside of the much more universal BT phone network, outside of large towns and cities it's basically non-existent.

You can have a look at whether the service is available at your postcode on our Virgin Media deals page.

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