Broadband speeds

[james41]

I have greatly varying broadband speed with BT as my ISP. This is not variation at peak-times but a steady decline in speed over a number of weeks. The speed obtained over the last week or so was 0.7Mbps so I complained .
The engineer who investigated found the line capable of 4.4 Mbps and 3.9 Mbps available just before the signal enters the router. He got the exchange to change my setting manually to get the speed up to 1.9 Mbps when tested on downloads through the PC. What are the likely reasons for the difference between the 3.9 available and the 1.9 obtained? Is it a network card problem or a router problem (BT HomeHub) or something else? It's a mystery to me!
Just before writing this, now the engineer has gone, I have a download test at 3.6Mbps (Highest ever!)
I don't suppose that will last and am puzzled as to what goes on in the telephone exchanges.
Any explanations welcome.
James

[lazareth1]

Here's some food for thought.

http://usertools.plus.net/tutorials/id/10

[johnwill]

Register at DSLReports and run their Line Quality Tests. It's best to run this test with a direct wired connection to eliminate any wireless issues from the results. It's useful many times to run this test several times, and we'd like to see each of the results. Post the results link from the top of the test display page for each test run here.

The link to post is near the top of the page and looks like:

If you wish to post this result to a forum, please copy/paste this URL
http://www.dslreports.com/linequality/nil/2357195 <- sample only, yours will obviously be different!
and your IP will be disguised.

Copy/paste that link here.

Note: You will have to enable PING (ICMP) request response either in your router (if you have one), or in your computer's firewall for direct modem connections. This is very important to get the most important part of the test to run.