How to choose a phone bundle

Pros

Convenience

Buying services separately could cost twice as much as a bundle

You have only one company to deal with – so more convenience and less paperwork.

Value for money

You’ll usually get more for your money. Bundles are often competitively priced, especially if you already use one of the services they come with.

Buying home phone and broadband separately, for example, could cost you as much as double what you’d pay for a home phone/broadband bundle.

Cons

One size fits all

The bundled services may not meet your exact requirements in the same way as buying each service separately – so the broadband cap or speed may not be as high as you’d like, for example.

Availability

You may not be able to get the bundle you want. For example, some of Virgin’s best-value deals are available only on cable, and some deals cost extra if you don’t live in an area where a company has installed its own equipment in BT exchanges (local loop unbundling, or LLU).

Problems switching

Bulk switching several services at once can increase the risk of problems, such as being left without a phone service for several days or even weeks.

With some local loop unbundled providers such as TalkTalk, the fact that they don't use BT's equipment means you may have problems when you want to switch away to another bundle provider. Ofcom is currently putting procedures in place to prevent this problem.

Extra costs

‘Free’ may not mean free. Even if you live in an area where you can get ‘free’ broadband, there are likely to be extra costs, like connection fees or technical helpline costs.

And to qualify for ‘free’ broadband, you must pay a monthly fee for another service. Sky offers free broadband only to Sky TV subscribers. And free broadband pioneer TalkTalk requires you to sign up to one of its higher level calls plus line rental packages.

Long contracts

You may be tied into a long contract for all the services, making it harder to switch any or all of them.

Line rental

You may still have to pay BT for landline rental, as some providers don’t offer this.

Lower satisfaction

Sometimes low prices seem to come at the cost of lower satisfaction – as our table on the 'Offers compared' page shows.

Overall satisfaction with bundles isn’t as high as it is with the best performing individual services (broadband, home phones, and mobile service providers), and no provider scored highly enough in our survey to warrant Best Buy status for its overall bundle service.