My Mum has asked me to see if I can find a way of making the telephone cheaper.

Currently, with British Telecom, we pay about £65 per quarter for line rental and calls.

Then, we pay £5.99 per month for Plusnet value broadband, which uses DSLMax, but my modem will only ever sync at 2Mbps download speed. It has a 10GB per month cap. This makes a total of around £85 per quarter.

Personally, I wouldn't mind something a little faster with a bit more data transfer per month .

To achieve cheaper telephone calls, I would have to switch to a provider other than British Telecom.

Plusnet have a landline service which when combined with their value broadband, comes to £53.22 per quarter (possibly excluding certain calls). It would cost £68.22 if I went for the Extra broadband instead of the Value broadband. Both much cheaper than BT+Plusnet.

Another option I just looked at would be BE. They say I can probably get a 17Mbps connection, but as my exchange doesn't yet have the 21st Century Network (we are getting it at the end of March 2011 apparently), I expect this would use some kind of LLU stuff. BE's broadband, as far as I can tell, is not capped. It would cost about £76 per quarter for both BE broadband and telephone (not including certain calls).

Has anyone had any experience with using a non-BT telephone line?

The idea of not using BT for a telephone line is a little beyond me . Maybe it will make a bit more sense after I've had some sleep.

Edit: Regarding BE's speeds. I just checked the number of my old house which is on a different exchange, and already has 21CN and was ADSL enabled back in 2000, and their website reckons it can get 7Mbps. I also checked the number of house a couple of miles further away from my exchange, and it thinks that that house will only get 2Mbps!