That is indeed, a good question. After all, it is long since we suffered the outrageous billing that added to the fortunes of Business Serve who neglected to actually supply our email. We were forced to take up arms against the sea of troubles our last supplier, Bulldog, put us through and luckily our credit card company refunded the money we had been overcharged. So why on earth do we want to switch broadband supplier this time?

It was while trying to upgrade the firmware in our router, which currently works perfectly well with 6Mbps download, 0.7Mbps upload on our 8Mbps Max+ line. If Linksys had a better website with Mac versions of the updater we wouldn’t have done a Google search for hints on what to do with the empty .img file Linksys sent rather than the .bin file they say our router needed.

Broadband-expert (.co.uk) told us our speeds but also that there are 53 better broadband services than the one we use at the moment. One, with a predilection for pink , is not only £10 a month cheaper but offers up to 24Mbps down and a massive 2.5Mbps upload speed. Even allowing for attenuation, plus the number of birds sitting on the line outside and if the wind is from the wrong direction, this could more than double our data throughput.

But can we go through the heart-ache and the thousand electric shocks as we grunt and sweat under dusty desks with the dread of something not working after the switch-over? It will mean a new router, supplied by Be (for it is they) and switching from 30 days to a 90 days contract.

So is it to Be or not to Be? Experience of other ISPs does make cowards of us so any recommendations welcomed or if we should fly to others we know not of.