If you have genuinely not made any changes to your configuration and the only thing that appears to have happened is something in the street, then you need to get onto BT as soon as possible and back this up with a written complaint.

January is a long time ago and I would not have waited this long for answers. Time is not a good healer in these cases and your complaint is likely to reach deaf ears given that this is four months ago.

I shall not go into the speed issues here as they have been written to death on the forum but suffice to say that an 8Mbit service will only give you a realistic "up to" 8Mbit which may be nearer to 5 or 6 real.

Warning - long post! 

When I moved to my current address (July 2006) I also was upgraded to the 8MB max package. After four weeks and endless support calls they finally managed to get the whole thing working and my rate was 8000 expected and I got 6900 in reality. Also response time was very fast and I had no problem accessing sites all over the world.

Wow! Thinks I this is great and these were exactly the speeds I got for quite some time.

However in January a van turned up down the road on a Sunday morning and without any indication whatsoever they switched off the phone, and not just mine but the whole road too.

Eventually the phone went back on at 11:00pm on the Sunday - Great a whole day with no emergency phone and no indication from BT this was happening - Anyway my rate started 3 weeks of fluctuating and finally settled on 4000 with a throughput of around 2500 - not so good I thought but still better than when I was on Blueyonder cable at 1Mbit.

Or so I thought. 

There now seemed to be other introduced problems such as very poor response time depending upon the time of the day. Off peak it was fine at around 1 sec, on-peak it could take 5-10 secs to respond. There were no problems with access to remote sites however.

For the last 4 weeks it has had a throughput of 4000 rated, 1000 reality and (3500 according to BT's speedtest) - response time is simply terrible during on-peak with pages not loading at all or freezing half way (after 6:00pm until about 10:30pm - all day Weekends). Remote sites are semi-inaccessable on-peak (very slow or not at all) with some UK sites also inaccessable.

I've got the following config.

3COM router - plugged directly into main socket
Phone is mainly switched off
Have swapped router, filter, ADSL cable.

Now I was originally sitting out the problem but it hasn't gone away so I'm probably going to have to start the ridiculous 4 week fight with BT to do something about it.

I'm not looking forward to it as I hate being told that the problem is my end and also that I never had a 8000 connection in the first place so why am I saying it has dropped.