Thank you jollyjohn, I have pretty good service from Plusnet but I believe my problems are BT exchange based. If their fault scanner decides there is a fault it reduces speeds down to the 300's kbps level and it requires a reboot of some kind to get back to norm., but even then it can be days before a decent download speed is achieved.I'm 1.6 miles from a rural exchange so I don't expect miracles but what concerns me is that if the Uswitch speeds are achievable then my speeds are rubbish, remember it's the same exchange and these speeds are from nearby streets. Even if I had a consistent download of 1.5Mbps life would be better. Used the BT tester this morning it gave me 627kbps download. Could it be that BT are ensuring that their broadband customers are getting the lions share of the bandwidth available?

morning jollyjohn, The current profile is now 750kbps which I believe is lower than I used to have. Is there any speedtester which is accurate ? I thought that limiting or "strangling" of bandwidth did occur. I think my best bet is to ask around the village to find what sort of speeds can be obtained.I heard from TalkTalk than they could offer (using LLU) download of 3Mbps but they have such a lousy reputation I can't consider switching to them but if they can "offer" this then why can't BT upgrade their equipment to do the same, after all we pay them a small fortune every year.