Well, yesterday my connection dropped, and when it came back around I was on some odd gateway with it looks like dodgy / incomplete DNS settings. And it had full line rate, almost full line rate for single threads! Chancing my arm (as it was a Manchester connection with poor latency), I dropped the session and connected again, back to half line rate for most places, poor single threads. Did a bunch of session drop / restarts, but never ended up back on the high performance gateway. Don't know if it was some test box out in the wild or what.
traceroute to
www.google.com (172.217.169.36), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 51-148-72-73.dsl.zen.co.uk (51.148.72.73) 12.226 ms 12.154 ms 12.193 ms
2 no-dns-yet-51-148-73-142.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.142) 20.249 ms 20.443 ms 20.193 ms
3 lag-16.p2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.103) 20.150 ms 20.115 ms 20.091 ms
4 lag-1.br2.thn-lon.zen.net.uk (51.148.73.169) 20.303 ms 20.274 ms 20.237 ms
5 72.14.223.28 (72.14.223.28) 20.211 ms 20.415 ms 72.14.217.190 (72.14.217.190) 19.673 ms
6 * 74.125.242.97 (74.125.242.97) 22.080 ms *
7 172.253.66.89 (172.253.66.89) 22.209 ms 142.251.54.32 (142.251.54.32) 19.639 ms 172.253.66.98 (172.253.66.98) 21.753 ms
8 108.170.246.175 (108.170.246.175) 20.032 ms 172.253.66.89 (172.253.66.89) 22.074 ms lhr48s08-in-f4.1e100.net (172.217.169.36) 20.824 ms