The connection icon on your taskbar will show the speed your PC is connected to the modem at. This is totally seperate from your broadband connection speed.
To test your broadband connection speed, you need a speed tester. One good one is at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d...speedtest.html. It will produce 4 sets of results, and the column at the far right should match (or be near to) the connection speed tier you are on, when the speed is converted to killobits per second. Basically you multiply the speed your are on (which NTL and Telewest express in Megabits per second) by 1024. The result should be near (it may not be exact) the results from the speed test.
Welcome BTW.