I've not seen any problems in the Rottingdean area mentioned on the forums recently, there's a VERY vocal community who will immediately jump on the forums when there's problems, which is very helpful for diagnosing issues.
I'm in Birmingham on the Edgbaston exchange - due to the torrential rain and floodwater two of the BT cables from the Edgbaston to South Birmingham exchanges were taken out and there's been long outages, but I've not suffered anything like that.
What's your phone line like at the moment attenuation and speed wise? I have an attenuation of 41.5dB (it goes up on ADSL2+) and I get 8-10Mb, just about full upstream though as the lower frequencies are used (which are less affected by attenuation).
First thing I recommend you do is go on the Be* forums and read up all the helpful threads for newbies to tweak your line, make sure your wiring's right, get the DMT tool and check out your router stats and signal to noise ratio margin... All useful things to do to get the most out of your line.
Oh, and do the MaxMTU rigmarole to make sure your MTU send/receive window is optimised for fast ethernet traffic. And don't use the USB connection off the router! Please!
Ironically, as the Aussies are way ahead of us ADSL2+ wise, there's a few ISPs like Internode who've done graphs of estimated sync rates for connections (which are usually spot on)... You might find it useful:
More info and related reading:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum...s.cfm?t=549601