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There has been much talk of late marking the end of the bog standard fixed phone line. While this may be a little premature there are certainly one or two clouds gathering on the horizon and the cause of the doom and gloom is a shameless little product called “naked DSL’.

The driving force behind this has been the emergence of VoIP technology, which lets you make phone calls over the internet rather than route them through the traditional telephone network. But there was a catch: to use VoIP you needed broadband and most broadband connections still require a telephone line.
Now there's a new type of broadband service called naked DSL, or nDSL, which not only removes the need for an active phone line but lets you ditch the monthly line rental charges. That's a saving of over $27 a month based on Telstra's line rental.

You still need the physical line to connect your PC to the internet but that line no longer has to be "live". There's no dial tone so it's as if the line has gone dead.

But it's not dead: it's just a "naked" or bare bones copper line without any services loaded onto it. Sign up for naked DSL and that line becomes your super-speed ADSL2+ broadband pipe to the internet.

Naked DSL has obvious appeal to anyone who has already slashed their phone bill by moving to VoIP, where call costs are a fraction of those charged by the standard landline carriers. For them, a hard-wired phone line - and the mandatory monthly rental that goes with it - is largely redundant.

It's also a winner for anyone who mainly uses the mobile to make and take calls, and doubly so for renters who may baulk at paying Telstra's $59 telephone connection fee every time they move into new premises. Naked DSL can be activated on an otherwise "dead" phone socket without a technician making a house call. But the bare truth of the matter is that naked DSL isn't for everyone.

"It's certainly getting a lot of hype and no one likes paying line rental when they don't use their phone much or at all," says Phil Sweeney, editor of Australia's popular Whirlpool broadband hub (whirlpool.net.au). But Sweeney says that there's still a small line rental cost attached to nDSL plans - it's just rolled into the overall plan and paid direct to your internet service provider rather than Telstra.

"This hidden cost can range from $15-$20, so while it's typically less than what you'd pay for line rental the saving may only be $5-10 depending on what line rental plan you're on. And it can be worth paying that little extra to have a landline there just in case you need it, in case the net or VoIP isn't working or for incoming calls."

It is also worth noting that a landline is also a must-have for monitored back to base security alarms and anyone who wants the security of a phone line that's always available.

The public phone network is incredibly reliable, even if there's a blackout it will keep working, as long as you don't have a phone that plugs into an AC outlet to draw power. And your location is known, so if you call 000 the emergency services know exactly where to go.

For obscure technical reasons, not every internet service provider can do nDSL in all areas. At the time of writing only Exetel, Gotalk, iiNet and Internode are good to go naked across NSW, although more ISPs are certain to follow.

Naked DSL plans start at about $50 and usually cost a little more than standard ADSL2+ services, with that price difference being equivalent to the invisible line rental charge. Yet, as with any move to broadband, it pays to examine all the plans closely before you make the switch to nDSL.

For example, iiNet counts uploads as well as downloads in your monthly tally. This means you'll need to be careful running peer-to-peer file-sharing software such as BitTorrent or LimeWire because they work by constantly uploading files, even when you've finished a download session.

Overall data allowances for the cheapest plans range from 4GB to 48GB, with the allocation often split between peak and off-peak hours. Some ISPs charge an excess fee if you go over that limit, while others will cut back your connection speed until the new month (and a new billing cycle) begins. Other factors to consider and compare are contracts and set-up fees.

If VoIP is on the menu - and with your landline phone being ditched, it probably will be - then you'll also want to examine what each ISP does as part of its nDSL broadband bundle.

There is yet another sting in the tail, the loss of your cherished land line number. Number portability is by no means guaranteed and customers will have to make the difficult choice of letting go of their long held land-line numbers. That may be too much of an inconvenience for many.