This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

I know it’s an irrational stance, but it’s borne out of my experiences. In those four years it’s only failed once, and that was fixed within a couple of hours. At all other times it has reliably given me speeds close to what I’m paying for, with little slowdown at peak times and no need to worry about distances from exchanges or ageing copper wiring.

That always-there reliability, to me, is worth more than anything else a broadband provider can offer, and it’s something I’ve convinced myself – more so after listening to Barry bang on about it in what seems like every podcast – that ADSL services in this country can’t match.

Now, I know there are millions of people in the UK using ADSL, in all likelihood having experiences every bit as good as mine with cable, but all I can think about is my new flat being tarnished by this country’s inadequate infrastructure and I’m helpless to stop it.

So please, come forth and reassure me! Am I being overly pessimistic about ADSL? Do you get a reliable, always-there connection at good speeds, and if so which company provides it? I’ll be taking the plunge far too soon for my liking, so let me know your experiences in the comments below.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

We eased back the lid, for instance, to find an edge-to-edge screen and glossy finish that instantly makes the Freedom look like a far classier affair than plenty of the slightly staid netbooks that we’re used to seeing, and the keyboard feels good, too, offering decent size and travel. We’re not sure if it can yet match up to the charms of the Labs-winning Samsung N110, but it certainly felt comfortable enough to use for extended typing sessions.

The trackpad also felt good, with the pad itself proving nippy and responsive and the pair of buttons – which we always like to see instead of a single rocker – felt light and supremely clicky. Build quality was also solid, with the screen exhibiting no more flex than is to be expected and both keyboard and wrist-rest feeling resilient.

Inside, it’s typical netbook fare, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM promising to deliver entirely average benchmark results, and the 120GB hard disk providing plenty of storage. The included draft-n wireless is a nice touch but, in a slightly strange move from a mobile broadband company, there’s no in-built SIM slot, which is perhaps a fault in Zoostorm’s design rather than Virgin Media’s.

Instead, the Freedom is bundled with a Virgin Media mobile broadband dongle and, as is now the norm with mobile broadband deals, is offered for free when you sign up to a contract. In this case, deals start from £31 a month and include 10MB broadband and a landline phone, with the more expensive packages – costing £45 and £58 per month respectively – including faster broadband, more generous call packages and Virgin TV.

This raises the usual question, of course, of price: sign up for the cheapest 24-month tariff and you’ll be shelling out £744 over the course of the contract for this “free” netbook and, while this does include the price of the included TV, internet and phone packages, you’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons of the various deals offered by Virgin and its competitors: while T-Mobile doesn’t offer TV or phone access, for instance, its tariffs start at a mere £20 a month.

It’s also worth considering if it’ll be cheaper to just buy a USB dongle on its own and use that with your laptop instead, especially if you don’t necessarily need the extras that are included with Virgin’s various deals.

Our other major concern is battery life. The Freedom comes complete with a 3-cell battery that, it’s quoted, will last for two and a half hours – but, when the £304 Samsung N110 will last for more than eleven hours on a single charge, that’s not good enough. We’ll be sure to give the Freedom a thorough test in the PC Pro Labs but, suffice to say, we’re not expecting great longevity.

It seems to have the fundamentals nailed down pretty well, but there are still several question marks over the Freedom’s pricing structure and battery life. Suffice to say, the full picture will be revealed soon enough in the PC Pro review.

I remember when we first started talking about HD. Back then it was this mythical beast that would tear apart video as we know it with its millions of pixels, and leave us all cursing standard definition for being as fuzzy and vague as Colin Jackson’s “expert” Olympic analysis.

Then it arrived and we loved it. The first time I ran a 1080p video on my 40in TV, my non-techie housemate grabbed the controller and kept replaying the same HD movie trailer for what seemed like an hour, so enamoured was he with the detail. Those of us with a PlayStation3 or Blu-ray player can enjoy the delights of HD by renting movies, but TV has been much slower out of the blocks.

Put simply, even a drum-beating HD lover like myself can admit the line-up of HD channels just hasn’t been worth paying for. Cable customers with Virgin’s V+ box can watch several free channels like BBC HD (and enjoy the excellent Olympic coverage, Jackson aside), but Sky HD is the big gun we all pinned our hopes on. And it’s expensive. Very expensive.

The cost of the Sky HD box has recently been slashed by half to £150, which is a good step. But there’s still the £10 per month premium on your subscription, which if you want any decent line-up of channels will also have to include a Sky Sports and Movies subscription too. All in, the full HD package will cost you £55 a month – a lot of money for what began as a pretty paltry smattering of channels.

But that list has grown, and now Sky is upping the ante again. Today it announced the addition of seven more channels to the roster, bringing the total to a much more flattering 26. Three Sky Sports channels were already covered, but it always seemed unfair that the premium you were already paying for both the movie channels and the HD didn’t translate into a great amount of what you might expect – actual HD movies.

This update rectifies that with many of the best movie channels, including Sky Movies Action/Thriller, Sci-Fi/Horror, and the awesome Modern Greats, all appearing alongside the existing Screen and Premiere HD channels.

Don’t get me wrong, the Olympic coverage on the Beeb has been great, and the fact that we’ve all got so into it must partly be down to the techological advances like live online streaming – as Tim pointed out earlier in the week. But, apart from the two weeks of every year when people pretend to like tennis, it’s about the only major sport Auntie has left.

Sky has all the best bits, and seeing as movies and sport are the main things most people want in HD, it seems to me that the quantity of HD TV on offer has finally reached the threshold at which I always said I’d invest. Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

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…