Yes I am on a 2mbps service - at present - but my real interest is in establishing whether I can gain anything significant by going for a faster service.
If I cannot improve my synch speed, the return on extra cost would be less.
Change your ISP: these days you should be able to get "up to 8mbps" i.e. DSLMax for no extra charge from a large number of ISPs.
Unfortunately, there's not guaranteed way of telling how high a sync speed you may get on a DSLMax product, because of the many factors that may affect it. You have to ask to be transfered to it and see what you get. You can also
check here what an estimated maximum speed might be.
I have also learnt this afternoon that business grade services are not quite what they used to be, in that they seem no longer to be based on a lower contention, just a share of a higher capacity link somewhere up the network.
It is true that on
IP Stream that DSLMax uses there is no fixed contention rate as such, but your ISP could be throttling traffic. When you pay for a business connection you usually get higher throughput speeds because different QoS rules are applied to your connection by the ISP. Indeed according to Demon's description for Business 2000 you should get "Prioritised traffic during busy periods". Of course, if the contention happens at the exchange, or the particular server you are trying to connect to, there's not much the ISP can do. Also, with business accounts you get some sort of a Service Level Agreement (minimum level of performance, or your money back sort of thing), better support, and other bells and whistles that joe public do not get on their domestic accounts. However, I am not up to speed with fixed speed products so I can't really advise what a 2000 kbps fixed speed profile is meant to offer.
This was all triggered by periods of rather pathetic data rates during this last week - bottoming out yesterday morning at 58 kbps!! That was with no chnages in modem behaviour or synch speed; it was just network congestion somewhere. By evening things were back to a reasonable level.
Since you are paying for a business account you should be able to take this up with your ISP. It is up to them to show that it is not their part of the network management that is slowing things down, but something upstream to do with e.g. Internet routing problems, etc.