Gargh, as if moving house and getting to exchange of contracts hasn't been bad enough now comes the seemingly simple task of getting phone and broadband at the new house. How wrong can I be.

So, it turns out at the new house they use Talk Talk at the moment. Not my first choice for broadband and calls, that would be plus.net, but they would charge us £100 to connect the line. Plus they're more expensive than Talk Talk, so that's a bit of a let down. So, I thought I could get a BT line for calls, then get broadband from plus.net. However, again, that pesky connection charge, this time from BT for £122.50 puts us off. So looks like we're stuck with TalkTalk, we'll have to see how that goes.

So anyway, I then cancelled the BT line at our current house, and the broadband and calls with Pipex. Only both companies have stupid inflexible systems in place. BT can only cancel your line after 14 days. Don't ask me why, but that means our phone line will be active for whoever moves into our house 3 days after we've moved out, and we're going to be liable for the cost of any calls. Ridiculous, thank God we don't think anyone will be moving in immediately. And what if we hadn't had 14 days notice of our moving day, we'd have been screwed.

And as for Pipex, it is worse! I phoned up, and from today then can only cancel the broadband in 30 days, but the calls bit will be cancelled in 3-5 days. How stupid is that, so I wouldn't be able to ring anyone, but still browse the web. And it gets worse. So I say we're moving out in 13 days, but he can't do anything. 30 days, that's it. So now our broadband will run until sometime in Oct, even tho the BT landline is going in 2 weeks, so completely unusable, yet I'm still getting billed for it. One big con. And for the calls bit, I have to ring up again in a few days to cancel those, 3-5 days before we move out. They can't set an end date for the calls, no, that would be too sensible. It's a shame, because as a broadband service they've been super reliable.