Situation: I have a landline because I'm an ADSL customer with Bethere. I'm very happy with the service, the price, and the limitations (just about none). However my BT landline seems to have gone up in price 50% in the last year (bill for Sep-Dec 2010 was £28.xx, Sep-Dec 2011 was £44.xx) so I'm looking to change. The only calls I ever make from it are ones which are expensive from my mobile, and therefore are the ones which aren't included in call bundles anyway, so I'm after simple line rental, as cheap as possible.

I've found this which seems about as good a deal as it's possible to get, but does anyone here use Primus and have an opinion on them? I don't care about the reliability really, the landline virtually never gets used bar my mum calling me and occasional/unpredictable calls to customer services departments, but I do have to have a Be-compatible one (rather than switching it to someone like Sky/TalkTalk as that would mean taking their own broadband I believe?) so that I can keep with them. I won't switch to Virgin because they're not cheap and I've had problems with them before and would really rather not give them any money.

Why not Virgin?

Can't say I've ever had any problems with them, apart from their old V+ TV box, but that's for another thread.

Can't comment on Primus but we're with TalkTalk for the landline (excellent service and lots of freebie extras) and I have o2 broadband so no, you don't have to take thelandline providers broadband although for me it would be cheaper but I am more than happy with o2.

Longish story but I just generally don't like their attitude. A few years back (come to think of it, while they were still NTL but a rose by any other name.....), my girlfriend of the time wanted to move house. So I did the housemove thing online, and it said/emailed "no problems, just take your box with you and we'll be in touch after your move date to sort everything out". A few days later they got in touch, said "actually, your new address isn't covered so we can't move your contract, also you need to courier us the box back and you owe us for the 6 months of your contract".

I called them and told them that I didn't want to cancel, I wanted to move, and they'd said that I could move my service with no problems. Therefore it was their side of the contract which wasn't being upheld and I should be liable to cancel without penalty as they'd "missold" the service at the new address (their own T&Cs agreed with this). But it took weeks of phonecalls and talking to all their foreign call centres to get this point across until I finally spoke to a rather soothing Irish woman who sorted it all out for me. They also annoyed me because they refused to disconnect any of the old services, meaning that for the few weeks this was going on, there was someone else living in the house with free access to my phone line (which I would still have been liable for the charges for). The only way Virgin claimed they could block calls was for me to go around to the house and ask to be let in, so that I could ring customer services off my old phone and ask them to bar all outgoing calls.

I also get better download and upload speeds from my ADSL connection than I would from the Virgin connection with the most comparable price and there's no traffic shaping or caps, so if I feel like downloading a series of a TV show that I've missed I can do it without thinking about it. I also tend to use iPlayer on my TV a lot (downloading the HD streams), I use Steam to buy games (which can easily be a few gigs at a time) and therefore I prefer to have an uncapped, unshaped connection. On the other hand, I watch literally nothing on TV "live" and the only thing that goes on sometimes is CBBC for my daughter which I just do from iPlayer as well (I get no Freeview reception and can't be bothered to call anyone out to replace my aerial as iPlayer is a perfect alternative anyway).

On a pure cost comparison:

Virgin Media (10Mb broadband only) - £22.50/month (£17.50 for first three) + £49.95 setup charge - £304.95 year 1 cost then £270 per subsequent year

ADSL £20.87/month with no setup charges (comprised of BEthere - £14.08/month and Primus offer above - £6.79/month) - £250.44 yearly cost

It's only £50/year, but I'm also changing things like my mobile phone contract (planning on saving £200+/year) and all the savings I'm making will add up when put together. I'm sure Virgin are great if you want all their services, but their broadband on its own isn't cheap and I can use my existing ADSL connection with the cheap-as-chips line rental only service and still come out less than Virgin's pricing with more speed and more flexibility.

edit - savings advice above is inaccurate, obviously, because I'm not a Virgin customer currently. Actual savings over a year are actually closer to £100 (currently it's £14.60 for BT + £14.08 for Be each month, making £344.16 for a year of that service).

Speaking of speed, Virgin also have a track record (from what I hear from other techy friends, and a good friend of mine who works for them) of rolling out speed upgrades when certain areas just aren't ready for them. I have a friend in Lincoln, a speed upgrade was rolled out and his service became virtually unusable between ~6pm-~9pm (i.e. peak times). Virgin didn't acknowledge there was a problem with backhaul capacity for ages and when it became apparent there was one they gave a roughly 6 month lead time on a fix. So their expensive service looks good at up to 100Mb/s, but if there are too many big customers in an area it can really go downhill and they're not very quick about increasing capacity to handle it.

Contrast that with my ADSL connection where even though it's rubbish and over copper, the speed has always been stable and I've not had throughput problems, and Virgin could end up being an expensive backwards step

Been with Virgin media for over 2 years now. There was no BT line in the house we moved into which we were happy about as our previous ADSL service had been pants with your maximum speed being just under 1mb.

Only ever had one period of just a day with no internet but they sent an engineer the very next day to fix something in the green box outside.

We always seem to get our 10mb (1mb throughput) and always very quick.

Plus for some reason we never seem to have been taken off the promotion period so still only paying £13.90 a month for free weekend calls and broadband.

Don't bother with the TV service though... no point in paying for that when we have freeview and can access iplayer etc.

Phil

Yeah, if I lived in a marginal area then I'd possibly take my chances with Virgin. But I'm not too far for the exchange (my router stats actually show that I could get 18Mb/s, but I only pay for Be's 12Mb/s package as it's quick enough and the top package isn't worth the price hike for me) so I'm more than happy with my ADSL package. Hence why I'm just trying to cut the cost of the line rental as that's the part I don't use

I'm still with BT and it costs me £120/per year line rental including 'free' weekend/evening calls. Only snag is that you have to pay upfront.

Yeah, I didn't find out about that until recently, and I'd have to wait until September when the contract expires again to take advantage of it. Paying upfront I don't really mind, but it was never presented to me as an option in the renewal letter I got. Also Primus is still cheaper, and I wouldn't use the inclusive calls as I just use my mobile. As I say, the only time I use the landline is for the stuff which costs a small fortune on a mobile, and that's the numbers that aren't included in call packages anyway so they're irrelevant.

Think I'm going to just go for it, since no one on here seems to be using them to say anything bad...

Whether or not it's a one off ,can't say,but on a another forum bloke had BB problems . Primus wanted him to call Thompson to try and sort things out .Took a lot of persuasion to get Primus to even send him out a new modem .( Which was the problem) .He's not a happy chapppy. I did see more info on Primus on there( some not so good) .Will try and find it

Edit to add more info.

Some write ups

http://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk/broadband/review/new-call-telecom-primus#user

Owned by http://www.newcalltelecom.co.uk/

Edited 26 February, 201214 yr by VWD

I've only switched my voice line rather than my broadband. Hopefully the chances of me having any problem that affects my broadband are slim and that's really all I care about. I've already had an email to say my account's set up, the next step is they contact BT as I'm switching my phone number. They reckon the whole thing could be done with no loss of broadband service, which would be nice. If it goes totally wrong then I may be eating my words but so far everything seems normal...