My son used to work in contract marketing for several online companies, and said to me once: With the exception of cable and satellite providers such as Virgin Media and Sky, UK landlines are basically maintained by BT. If you change your internet provider, don't let them take control of the landline - keep it with BT - because if you want to change back to BT or to a service other than BT, there are extra charges involved.

We use BT for telephone and the internet and, for the most part, they've been good. They keep sending us advertising for TV and similar services, but I'm not interested in TV much anyway.