Richard

UK

Designer

Outdated landline contracts are another reason:

Although more and more people now live mobile, transient lives, landline contracts for phones & broadband are still tailored for static lives;

Based around a permanent address rather than a flexible, mobile life-style.

BT landline phone contracts have a minimum term of 12 months, heavy early exit penalties and no cheap or easy way to transfer the phone contract between successive tenants of a rented house.

Most broadband contracts also have a minimum term of 12 months; again with no way to transfer the remainder of the contract.

Also, most of these contracts require successful credit checks, so large numbers of people are excluded.

So, many people can obtain only expensive pay-as-you-go mobile phones.

Our village has very poor mobile coverage, so mobiles do not work reliably.

It seems strange that Ofcom allows such unimaginative marketing of landlines and broadband services to exclude increasing numbers of people from having easy economic access to modern communications.

In areas with good mobile coverage, perhaps cheap pay-as-you-go 3G could fill the gap?