I moved house a couple of weeks ago. Very spacious actually, although the garden could do with a trim, thanks for asking. Being an IT nerd, the first thing I did when I’d finished unloading boxes was to get the phone line and Internet set up – how hard can it be, right?

The answer, according to those lovely folks over at BT and TalkTalk, appears to be “as difficult as we can possibly make it without sticking two fingers up and suggesting yoghurt pots and a piece of string”.

Here’s the deal: the current TalkTalk line is in the process of being transferred to the previous tenant’s new address, but I’ve been told that’ll take a whopping four weeks (starting, bizarrely, from a week after I moved in). Both TalkTalk and BT have insisted I cannot do anything with the perfectly good phone line in my house until after that point – despite the fact that it’s currently taking and making no calls. It’s effectively useless.

Even worse, though, is that both companies then proceeded to fight to not have to take my custom. TalkTalk insisted the line would automatically revert to BT after that, and they could no longer help me – odd seeing as most of their new customers are switched over from BT lines. BT countered by saying the line was now TalkTalk’s property, and I’d have to stump up £125 to get it switched back over.

Faced with the not wholly attractive prospect of waiting four weeks to find I have no line at all, I gave up on the both of them.

Five minutes later, I got off the phone to Virgin Media. My broadband is already activated, I can install it myself and I’ll be online (with a far more reliable connection than ADSL, I’d imagine) in days. Now if only they still showed Sky One…