Hi, we have a landline phone number but haven't connected it/used it for a few years. We have broadband by Starlink (BT broadband couldn't provide sufficient signal strength).
We would like our landline reconnected but I cannot seem to find a way around the BT site to do this. We don't want broadband with BT but we want our line connected so we can make calls from a home phone... Hope I have explained this correctly... Help!
So you want a phone line service only ? , a couple of things to note , as you have broadband from another provider (Starlink) you won’t qualify for the BT ‘no broadband’ discount, and therefore the costs for a telephone only service will be little or no cheaper than a combination of broadband (even if it’s slow ) with an included phone service …the price for standalone telephone is here .
https://www.bt.com/landline/deals/
A second issue is there is no PSTN telephone service available to order , so BT telephony has to be provided as Digital Voice ‘DV’ , an IP (internet protocol) service, and even if you are unaware , in the background or possibly foreground you will have broadband to make the telephone service work …there are two ways , one is you are provided with broadband that you don’t pay for , your phone is connected to the broadband router that you are supplied with , to connect your phone instrument to (because it’s DV ) or you are connected to ‘broadband’ but the broadband equipment and analogue telephone adapter is located within the exchange so you don’t need any mains powered equipment inside your home for the telephone service to work but ‘under the hood’ it’s the same as everyone else’s DV service .
As standalone telephony is a pretty rare thing to order these days,(as opposed to legacy phone only customers that are still connected to the old PSTN phone network) as a new customer it may be problematic to arrange this uncommon product, and financially as you have broadband from another source it makes little or no sense to order it .
DV need less than a 1mb connection to operate successfully
As stated , the bandwidth needed for Digital Voice is so small that it’s unlikely that broadband, even if it were not fast enough for your ‘normal’ usage, won’t be sufficient for telephony only and as you don’t actually pay for broadband (even though it’s delivering your phone service) it’s irrelevant that you can’t use it for email, browsing , VOD , Teams , etc .
FWIW , someone posted on here wanting a phone only service for a relative , they advised (once it was installed) that they could actually use the broadband included with telephony package, but were warned that if it were obvious that they were using it for the ‘internet’ , they would be moved off the telephone only tariff onto a more appropriate broadband with phone service tariff ( they qualified for the discount whereas you don’t because you have a broadband service from Starlink )