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I was aware of the bitter irony even while I held the phone to my ear. As I sat there, listening to calming orchestral music, yards to my left was a copy of last month's PC Pro promising to increase my broadband speeds. Right at that moment, however, you could have doubled my speeds, tripled them, even multiplied them by a thousand, and they still wouldn't have been any better. I was cut adrift in the broadband abyss with nothing to save me but my ISP.

At last, the music cut off. "You are second in the queue. Your call is valuable to us. Please hold." Seconds later, a voice came on the line. "Good morning and thank you for waiting. My name is Nina. How may I help you?"

I explained my dilemma. Until the previous evening, I'd been the happy beneficiary of a rock-solid broadband connection. Had been for years. But on firing up my laptop that morning, I hadn't been able to connect. Had they done work on the line, I asked? Had some setting changed that I needed to alter?

Ignoring my pleas that I'd done all the sensible things, she ploughed through her checklist. Yes, I'd rebooted the router. Yes, I'd rebooted the PC. No, I hadn't installed any new software. And what, she wondered, was the name of my router? "It's the Draytek Vigor 2600," I explained.

A pause. "I'm sorry. That's not a supported router."

This, I soon discovered, was the equivalent of clubbing innocent baby walruses in the minds of my ISP. If you're using the wrong router, the customer support team consider you not just stupid but unclean. "You brought it upon yourself,"

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I could hear Nina think. "Your call is no longer important to us."

I spent the rest of the day gently cursing, trying to resist the urge to take my frustration out on the laptop itself. I replaced the microfilter, used a new phone cable from the socket to the back of the router, factory-reset the damn thing, before finally digging out an old non-wireless router and hurling abuse at that instead. All to no avail.

Eventually I made a mini-breakthrough after a phone call with my Zen-like father, who pointed out that it must be a software setting. I realised, roughly 24 hours too late, that I was using the wrong login, as I'd switched the master account two years ago. Fool.

This brought marginal success, but I was stuck with an intermittent connection. There was, I decided, a fundamental problem somewhere, whether due to a flaky line, flaky firmware or the moon's alignment with Venus. And my ISP wasn't going to help.

Which is where Barry came in. That is, Barry Collins, our esteemed news and features editor, and also the powerhouse behind this month's mobile broadband feature. "Cup of tea, Barry?" I suggested on Monday morning. He eyed me suspiciously but passed me his still-warm mug. "What do you want?"

I cut to the chase: "I want one of those dongles." I gestured to the pile on his desk. "Just to borrow for a week or so." He muttered something I'm fairly certain shouldn't be said in polite company, but once the hot tea had melted away some of his Monday morning obstinacy, he agreed.

And so, for one blissful week I didn't have to worry about my unreliable home broadband connection. I even took my new shiny friend to a conference with me, which meant I didn't need to bother trying to hook up to a flaky Wi-Fi connection. I was connected all the time, and what's more it was blissfully easy.

Of course, it didn't last. Like all the best romances, it ended with rejection, as the cruel company reclaimed its dongle from my clutches. And so, even as I write this two weeks later, I'm stuck with a dodgy broadband connection - and a yearning to dump my ISP in favour of that shiny, perfect USB stick.