Cable Forum - "Server Improvements"

From the virginmedia.com broadband service status page...

"On the morning of Wednesday the 11th April between midnight and 6 AM, Network improvements will result in a loss of service in Hemel Hempstead, Leicester, Lichfield and the surrounding areas. Updates to the virginmedia.com homepage may result in a brief loss of services. Server updates in Oxford, Peterbrough, Poplar, Renfrew, Southampton and the surrounding areas may result in a delay in provisioning Cable Modem services."

I'm in the Peterborough area (or as VM want to call it "Peterbrough") and since Wednesday, I have been enjoying the following "improvements";

(1) My previously rock-solid-even-in-the-evenings 10Mb service has become a flaky, anything-between-150k and 3.5Mb service
(2) The proxy server that I used to be connected to has disappeared, so I am apparently no longer connecting through a transparent cache ("What's my proxy" confirms this fact)

Now I used to think that proxys were a bad thing, but current experience suggests otherwise. Is this loss of speed likely to be temporary ("delay in provisioning of cable services"), or is this all I have to look forward to under the new management? I thought I'd give it a couple of days to iron out any wrinkles with the new servers, but here I am on Friday night still crawling along with the hapless ADSLers.
(My SACM config and upstream/downstream parameters have not changed and are pretty much optimal.)

Any insight would be appreiciated

Rob

---------- Post added at 21:28 ---------- Previous post was at 21:12 ----------

I've just manually specified the proxy server that I always used to have no choice about connecting through, and surprise, surprise...my speed is back up to it's usual 9800 kb/s !

:)

Rob