- Line rental was the charge for the underlying copper phone line that older broadband packages were provisioned over, billed through Openreach's Wholesale Line Rental product.
- SOGEA and full fibre remove that copper voice line from the order, so newer broadband connections do not carry a separate line rental element.
- Ofcom required providers to advertise broadband as a single all-inclusive monthly price from 2016, ending the practice of quoting broadband and line rental separately.
- The disappearance of line rental is tied to the retirement of the analogue Public Switched Telephone Network and the all-IP transition completing in 2027.
- Where a household still wants a phone number, calls are now delivered over the internet using Voice over Internet Protocol rather than the old copper voice path.
Broadband without BT line rental works because SOGEA and full fibre remove the underlying copper voice line. New connections are sold as a single all-in price with no separate line rental charge.
Last reviewed: June 2026
What line rental used to be
For most of the broadband era, a home internet connection was not actually a standalone product. It was an overlay on a copper telephone line, and that line had to be paid for. The charge was called line rental, and it covered the maintenance and provision of the physical copper pair running from the local exchange to the property. The phone line came first, historically; broadband was bolted on top by adding equipment at the exchange and using frequencies on the line that the voice service did not need.
This meant a household paying for broadband was, in effect, paying two distinct things: the rental of the line and the cost of the broadband service riding over it. Even customers who never made a single phone call still paid line rental, because without the line there was nothing for the broadband to run on. The arrangement made sense when the copper network was the only path into the home, but it baked an extra fixed cost into every connection regardless of whether the voice service was used. The mechanism that made this possible was a technique that split the copper pair's frequency range: the lower band carried the analogue voice service while a higher band carried the broadband data, so a single pair of wires did two jobs at once. That is why the line had to exist and be rented even for a broadband-only household, because the data service physically depended on the same copper that the voice service used.
Behind the retail bill sat a wholesale arrangement. Retail providers bought the underlying line from Openreach through a product known as Wholesale Line Rental and resold it to the customer, often alongside a separate broadband product. So the line rental a household paid was not an arbitrary add-on invented by the retailer; it reflected a real wholesale input cost for maintaining the physical pair and the exchange equipment that terminated it. Understanding that two-layer structure, a wholesale line plus a retail broadband service, makes it clear why removing the copper voice line from newer products removes the line rental too.
Why line rental is disappearing
The decline of line rental is driven by two forces working together. The first is the retirement of the analogue Public Switched Telephone Network. According to Openreach's published timeline, the country is moving off the legacy copper voice platform as part of an all-IP transition completing in 2027, and a product whose whole purpose was to rent an analogue voice line no longer fits a network that is moving away from analogue voice altogether. As exchanges are upgraded and the analogue voice platform is withdrawn, the very thing that line rental paid for, an active analogue telephone service on a copper pair, ceases to exist as a sold product.
The second force is the arrival of broadband products that do not need the voice line at all. SOGEA, or Single Order Generic Ethernet Access, supplies fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband as a single order with no analogue phone service underneath. Full fibre, or fibre-to-the-premises, runs fibre all the way to the home and likewise has no copper voice line to rent. Once a connection is built on either of these, there is simply no separate line to charge rental for. The copper voice line that line rental paid for has been engineered out of the order. These two forces reinforce each other: the switch-off removes the reason to keep selling analogue lines, while the new single-order products give providers a clean replacement to sell instead, so the industry has both a push away from the old model and a ready alternative to move customers onto.
SOGEA and full fibre as the alternatives
SOGEA is the most direct replacement for the old FTTC-plus-line-rental arrangement. It uses the same fibre-fed street cabinet and the same copper run to the home, so the broadband behaves like standard fibre-to-the-cabinet, but the analogue voice line is removed. From an ordering point of view it is a single product rather than a voice line with a broadband overlay, which is precisely why there is no line rental component left to bill. The word single in the product name is doing real work: where the old model required two underlying orders, a line and a broadband service, SOGEA collapses them into one generic broadband order, so there is no second line item for a voice line to attach to.
Full fibre goes further by replacing the copper entirely. Because fibre-to-the-premises has no copper pair at all, the concept of renting a copper line does not apply. Both products represent the same shift: broadband is now the primary service, and any phone number is an optional digital add-on delivered over the internet. Where a customer still wants a landline number, the provider supplies it as a Voice over Internet Protocol service through the router, which is a separate matter from renting a physical copper line. With VoIP the call is converted into data packets at the router and carried over the same broadband connection as everything else, so the phone service rides on the broadband rather than the broadband riding on the phone line. That reversal of the old relationship is the heart of why line rental no longer appears.
How the evolution of line rental looked
The table below traces how the line rental charge changed over time, from the era when it was billed separately, through the period when Ofcom forced it into a single advertised price, to the present where newer connections remove it entirely.
| Era | Connection type | How line rental appeared |
|---|---|---|
| Early broadband | ADSL over copper | Charged separately from broadband |
| From 2016 | ADSL and FTTC | Folded into a single advertised price |
| SOGEA era | Fibre-to-the-cabinet, no voice line | No separate line rental element |
| Full fibre era | Fibre-to-the-premises | No copper line to rent at all |
What this means for pricing transparency
The biggest practical effect for households is clarity. In the era when line rental was billed separately, the headline broadband price often looked low because the line rental was quoted elsewhere or in smaller print. Ofcom intervened on this in 2016, requiring providers to advertise broadband as a single, all-inclusive monthly price rather than splitting out line rental. That ruling removed a long-standing source of confusion where the advertised figure was not the figure a customer actually paid. The change was an advertising and presentation reform: it did not abolish the underlying line cost, but it forced that cost to be shown inside the headline price so that the number a customer saw in an advert matched the number on the bill.
With SOGEA and full fibre, the position is cleaner still, because there is no line rental to fold in or hide. The monthly price quoted is the price of the broadband, with any phone service shown as a separate option rather than an unavoidable underlying charge. For households that never used the landline, this removes a cost that previously had no benefit to them. The mechanism behind any saving is straightforward: the copper voice line that line rental paid for is no longer part of the order, so it is no longer part of the bill. Whether a household actually pays less than before depends on the broadband package and provider, because providers set the all-in price for the new products in their own way, but the structural change is real: the unavoidable analogue line cost has been removed from the foundation of the service rather than merely relabelled.
What happens to existing landline users at the switch-off
Households that still rely on a traditional landline will not simply lose their phone when the analogue platform is withdrawn. The move to digital voice is a migration rather than a disconnection, and providers are expected to move customers to a comparable digital voice service so that calling continues. In most cases an existing phone number can be carried across by porting it to the new digital voice or VoIP service, so the household keeps the number it has used for years even though the underlying technology has changed beneath it. The handset itself often continues to work, plugged into the broadband router rather than a wall socket, which keeps the change as familiar as possible for the customer.
There is one practical consideration that the old copper line did not raise. The legacy analogue line drew a small amount of power from the exchange, so a basic corded phone kept working in a power cut. A digital voice service runs through the router and depends on mains electricity, so providers are required to make arrangements, such as a battery backup unit, so that vulnerable customers can still reach the emergency services if the power fails. Anyone who depends on a landline for safety reasons, or who has no mobile coverage at home, should raise this with their provider before being migrated so that suitable resilience is put in place. Ofcom has set clear expectations on providers about protecting customers, and particularly vulnerable customers, through the transition.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I still pay line rental for broadband?
On modern SOGEA or full fibre connections there is no separate line rental charge, because the underlying copper voice line has been removed from the order. Some older copper-based packages may still reflect line costs within the price. The monthly figure on a current fibre package is the broadband price, with any phone service as a separate option.
What is line rental?
Line rental was the charge for the copper telephone line that older broadband connections were provisioned over, supplied at wholesale through Openreach's Wholesale Line Rental product. It covered the provision and maintenance of the physical line from the exchange to the property. Even customers who made no phone calls paid it, because the broadband relied on the line to function.
Has line rental been abolished?
Line rental has not been abolished by a single law, but it is being engineered out as connections move to SOGEA and full fibre, which have no copper voice line to rent. From 2016, Ofcom also required broadband to be advertised as one all-inclusive price rather than splitting line rental out separately, which changed how the cost was presented even before the new products removed it.
Do FTTP packages include line rental?
No. Fibre-to-the-premises runs fibre all the way to the home with no copper pair, so there is no physical line to rent. Any landline number on an FTTP package is supplied as an internet-based phone service rather than as a rented copper line, and it is treated as a separate optional element that rides over the broadband.
How does SOGEA remove the need for line rental?
SOGEA is sold as a single order for broadband only, with the analogue voice line stripped out of the underlying Openreach product. Because there is no separate copper voice line in the order, there is nothing to charge line rental for. Any phone service is added over the internet instead of through a rented line, reversing the old relationship between line and broadband.
