Further update. Engineer failed to show on Monday, I got a call around 1530 to say so from a lady at an NTL call center. Another appointment arranged for Tuesday PM.
Tuesday AM my speed is abysmal I'm surfing at 6.2 B\s s....... l ....... o.....w..... l ..... y.... life in the fast lane huh? Anyway, PM arrives eventually and a knock at the door signals the engineers arrival. He takes one look at the modem says "hmm, that one doesn't support above 6MB" (it came as a shock, as I recall the instructions saying 10MB. Not only that it had been running at 12000kbps for about 3 months). Anyway, he nips out to the van comes back with this tiny box, pulls out a smaller blue box. Installs it, sent a text message to who knows where (begin awkward silence) 10 minutes later and I have 10MB again, hooray!
Performed a speedtest and it comes back with 9.5MB which is "quite good" apparantly, seeing as the engineer "enjoys" (tolerates more like) about 8MB himself. Fast forward to 000hrs and I begin my gaming session. Ping is a little bit high but stable right upto 0300 and then Bang ! My speed drops, up goes my ping and I find that I am on 6MB after a speedtest ... I cancel out of my game and start my browser. Speed to connect to Google.com 6.6kb ... connection to Usenet the same, connection with RealPlayer and VLC Media Player to
www.di.fm so bad I can't connect (my neighbours were probably pleased alas I'm certainly not). By 0540 I'm getting tired so decide to opt for bed and the slow surfing its getting to me. So I start my downloads and notice I am downloading at a pawltry 4MB, which after a couple of minutes rose to 8MB and then finally about 10 minutes later 10MB before dropping again.
So what happens between 0300 and 0600 at NTL ? As I would like to actually be able to use my connection.