So here's an update guys.

BT engineer turned up this morning, plugged his box into the BT owned connection behind the consumer faceplate. Guess what? Getting 7MB connection speeds. Said it was something to do with my internal wiring and then buggered off. I disconnected my router and set it all up connected to my laptop on the main incoming phone line, rather than the one in my office that I'm currently using.

By using my Netgear router set up page I was able to monitor the sync speeds which were also around 7MB. So I knew by now that the line was OK, my router was picking up the required speeds, yet I was still getting 496k download speeds.

Got onto Pipex. After speaking to a really unhelpful 'techie' there I was about to give up. I then remembered that I have another phone line in the house that wasn't being used. I had it installed in days of old when I was on dial up and the wife used to get really pissed off about me hogging the phone line so I had another line installed. Then broadband came along and I had it disabled. I was that desparate by now that I was considering joining up with another ISP on this new line. The downside was that it would cost me another £11 a month. Fortunately it didn't come to that.

I phoned Pipex again but this time got through to a helpful techie. He took a look at my sync speeds and said there's a real mismatch here .... I was connecting at 7MB but not able to download faster than 500K. He said he'd refer the problem straight back to BT suggesting that a line reset was required.

Great I thought, I'm now going to get back into another frustrating Pipex loop, but true to his word, he did get onto BT and a rep from BT wholesale rang me this afternoon. He did a bit of remote tweaking and now I'm getting 4.5MB which is a vast improvement. Despite trying to get to the bottom of the cause of the problem, the guy was a bit vague. He said that the difference between an ADSL MAX connnection is that monitoring equipment is constantly monitoring the line looking for stability. For some reason in my case it was levelling the speed out at 500K. I stil don't really understand why and the BT guy didn't explain it that well, but the problem seems to be cured. He said he'd implemented an immediate fix plus one that would take effect in the next hour or two. Watch this space!

He did mention that my sync speed was prone to fluctuation and reckoned this was why the monitoring couldn't decide on my optimum speed, so it opted for something completely riduculous and very slow. Things seem to be OK now but I'll be keeping a close eye on things.

I'm still bewildered as to why it's taken this long to implement this. It seems to me that the whole thing has been done *** about face and the only reason I've got anywhere is because I've hassled Pipex like mad. Also although the company is complete pants, there are one or two indiviiduals there who do actually get things done, but it's real pot luck.

I'll need to make sure that this is a permanent fix. I'm certainly not counting my chickens yet.

Best, YC