Broadband Woes

[cyborg]

Hello all, I am looking for a bit of advice with my broadband.

The situation is thus:

I live in a house share and the BT line is not currently connect AFAIK. Had a BeBox that seemed to be working irrespective of this. (I though a working phone line would be required for ASDL - perhaps it is not).

I basically don't want, don't need and don't care about making landline calls. If I have to get a landline I will simply have it call barred so no one else can use it and get me a whopping phone bill on their behalf.

I've looked at mobile broadband although to get a semi-useable (for me) amount of usage is going to require a lengthy contract and may not even work anyway. I'd prefer getting home broadband again but the guy in charge of it before seemed to think there was some sort of intermittent problems with it anyway - too late for me to try and do any analysis of anyway.

So I'm looking for some advice/explanations from far and wide:

1) Does ADSL really require a working BT line?
2) Any particular advice on what the best course of action for getting broadband in my situation might be?

Thanks in advance.

 

[the_smasher]

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I think you are wanting "naked" dsl. Here's the wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_DSL

 

[madurobob]

Hello all, I am looking for a bit of advice with my broadband.

The situation is thus:

I live in a house share and the BT line is not currently connect AFAIK. Had a BeBox that seemed to be working irrespective of this. (I though a working phone line would be required for ASDL - perhaps it is not).

I basically don't want, don't need and don't care about making landline calls. If I have to get a landline I will simply have it call barred so no one else can use it and get me a whopping phone bill on their behalf.

I've looked at mobile broadband although to get a semi-useable (for me) amount of usage is going to require a lengthy contract and may not even work anyway. I'd prefer getting home broadband again but the guy in charge of it before seemed to think there was some sort of intermittent problems with it anyway - too late for me to try and do any analysis of anyway.

So I'm looking for some advice/explanations from far and wide:

1) Does ADSL really require a working BT line?
2) Any particular advice on what the best course of action for getting broadband in my situation might be?

Thanks in advance.

I think what you are hoping to find is "Naked" DSL. That is, an active line for the DSL to run on, but no actual phone service.

This is a rare commodity, as the local phone companies make almost no money off this set up. There was an attempt in the Georgia legislature a year or two ago to make this a required offering, but it failed to pass.

So, if DSL is your only option, then you may be forced to sign up for local phone service to have a land line available for DSL. Sadly, that's just what I have to do. But, have you called your local phone prover(s) to ask? They may bundle DSL with local phone service such that the price is not that much different.

 

[Lensman]

Cyborg appears to be in the UK, so the rules are different.

Naked ADSl is not even an option here, you MUST have a working phone line for British Telecom (BT) to enable as ADSL - you don't have to connect a phone to it though, but you must still pay for the phoneline rental (to a phone service provider, it doesn't have to be BT) - on top of the charge for ADSL from an ISP which, again, does not have to be BT or the phone service provider.

e.g. You can rent the line from BT, have Talk-Talk as your phone service provider & Sky as your ISP, if you want to complicate things.