OK, i'm currently signed up with Pipex on their 'Up to 8 Meg' service. I've been having bother with it since late October 2007(So quite a while now...).
First, a bit of back-story
I live quite far away from my local exchange, so I was initially using Pipex's 512kb service with very little problems, the odd dropped connection every so often but nothing major(We had the special BT master socket installed, that provides an ADSL socket rather than using microfilters around the house). In early 2007, I was made aware that i'd be able to get faster speeds, so I upgraded to the Up to 8 Meg service I currently have. It was going very well, getting roughly 1.7Mb downstream and 512kb upstream which I was more than happy with.
Fast forward to late October 07 and my connection started acting bizzarely, it was constantly disconnecting and reconnecting every 10 seconds or so for an entire weekend, this then stopped and it was perfectly normal for roughly a week. The same thing happened in the middle of the next week, only this time when my connection re-established itself I was only getting 160kb downstream. I manually reconnected my router over the next few days, slowly increasing the speed from 160 to 192, 256, 448, 792 then up to around 1152. The problem was that if it disconnected at the higher speeds, it would go all the way back to 160 and take roughly a week to build back up.
This was rather annoying, and I contacted Pipex numerous times, all they really had me do was endless speed tests on a special BT site. This carried on until early 2008, when my connection was down for an entire week. Pipex arranged a BT engineer visit at this point. So the engineer comes round, does various tests and can't get connected, so he goes to the junction box at the end of my street(which is quite a distance away) and tells me he did a test there, and i'm getting roughly 2.7Meg there so the problem must be between the junction box and my house. He changes us onto one of the spare lines in the street then attempts to connect again. The connection establishes itself for about ten seconds then dies, so he tells me that he doesn't have time to discover what the problem actually is and leaves.
It was at this point that I discovered this site, and went about reading some of the advice given. By sheer coincidence my dad had the Netgear DG843G router that was reccomended on here, so we gave that a try, and after about 20 minutes of trying it managed to achieve an ADSL connection.
The only problem was is the speed was now permenantly stuck at either 160, 192 or in very rare occasions 256 downstream, I still get around half a meg upload. Also, it can take absolutely ages to establish a connection in the event that I try to reset it in order to achieve faster download speeds.
So, several phone calls to Pipex later and they say that they've told BT to limit my connection to 512kb downstream, which i'd be happy with, seeing as that's what I had for several years with no problems. However, i've seen absolutely no change in my connection since this cap has occured.
Here are my current line stats;
Connection Speed - Downstream 192kb/s Upstream 448Kb/s
Attenuation - Downstream 60db Upstream - 15.5db
Noise Margin - Downstream 12db Upstream - 17db
I've told Pipex that i'm still not getting decent download speeds and their response has been to ask me to run more speed tests, I really can't see this going anywhere and I really want all this nonsense to end, so i'm thinking of switching ISP's to BT. Is this likely to actually make any difference to the speed I get?
I know this is a fairly long post, but I thought it'd be better to list everything that has happened. I'd really appreciate if people took the time to read it and give me any kind of advice on what to do next.
Cheers.