For broadband, no. The old copper phone network, the PSTN, is being retired from 31 January 2027, and Openreach says the date will not move again. Landline calls are moving to digital voice, which travels over your broadband and plugs into the back of the router instead of the wall socket.

That quietly rewrites what "no phone line" means. A landline used to be the foundation your broadband sat on. Now it is an optional extra, a service delivered through the same router as everything else. If someone in your house still wants a home phone, a broadband and phone deal bundles digital voice with an inclusive call plan. If nobody has made a landline call since the last World Cup, broadband-only means you finally stop paying rent on a dial tone.

One honest caveat. Digital voice runs on your broadband and your electricity, so in a power cut the home phone goes down with the router. If someone in the household depends on the landline, perhaps an older relative without a reliable mobile, ask the provider about back-up options before you switch rather than after.

"No phone line" covers two different things: no phone service and no copper at all. It is worth knowing which one you are buying.

Full fibre is the real thing. The connection is glass all the way from the exchange to your wall, with no copper pair anywhere in the chain, which is why full fibre is where the best speed-per-pound now sits. Coverage is no longer the excuse it once was either, with around 9 in 10 UK homes now able to get a gigabit-capable connection of some kind.

Virgin Media is the other truly line-free option. Its cable network is Virgin's own, separate from the Openreach lines most big names rent, and it never needed a phone line in the first place. There is also 5G home broadband, which skips wires entirely: a plug-in router on the mobile network, typically 100-300Mbps where the 5G signal is strong.

The exception is FTTC, the part-fibre product the industry spent a decade selling simply as "fibre". The fibre runs to a green cabinet down the street, then the same old copper pair carries the signal into your house. You can buy it without any phone service, and millions do, but the copper is still doing the final leg. That is why it stalls around 80Mbps while full fibre keeps going past a gigabit.

Usually, yes, for the unexciting reason that you are buying fewer things. No line rental, no call plan you never use, no TV pack you half-watch. A clean standalone price is also easier to judge, because there is nothing else in the package to disguise the real cost. It is no accident that the cheapest broadband deals on the market are almost all broadband-only.

The comparison worth doing is against your own habits, not against the bundle's headline. A household that streams everything and lives on mobiles gains nothing from a bundle except a longer bill. A household that actually wants the sport channels or makes an hour of landline calls a week can come out ahead, because the packaged extras usually cost less than buying each one separately. The bundle is not a con. It is a product designed for a household that is slowly ceasing to exist.

So the test is simple. Write down what you would actually pay for if each part were sold on its own. If the answer is "the internet", buy the internet.

Three things. First, the post-intro price. Most headline rates step up after 12 or 24 months, and for contracts signed since January 2025 any mid-contract rise must be shown in pounds and pence next to the price, so the figure is there if you look. Second, the contract length, because a longer tie-in trades flexibility for price certainty. Third, the technology. At similar prices full fibre beats part-copper FTTC every time, and with the copper network heading for retirement it is also the connection that will not need replacing. Pick the speed your household actually needs rather than the biggest number on the page and the rest is easy.

The default order is best value: first-year cost at your address, marked down where the mid-contract rise stings. Because there is no TV or phone padding to weigh, this page tends to surface the truest speed-per-pound on the site. Paid placements and exclusives wear a badge that says what they are, so a deal never climbs the table just because a provider wrote a cheque.