SHJ... thanks for that. We've had something of a love / hate relationship with T'fonica over the years and always over ADSL speeds. The last time I contacted them was about eighteen months ago when speeds dropped right off. The problem seems to stem from the quality of work carried out my their subcontracted telecoms engineers some of whom have a habit of signing off work done without actually having done anything; they have a daily quota of jobs allocated and the time involved in travelling between clients and switching centres and actually carrying out fault diagnosis and repair is marginal too say the least.
I 've looked into Satellite Internet on various occasions and have always rejected this option due to the amount of time I spend and the up/down traffic I generate. Most Sat and Wimax systems include 'Fair Usage' clauses in their contracts which cap and throttle at quite low traffic levels and the speeds that are invoked under these conditions are typically those of the ancient dial up speeds! (Cant do Wimax anyway because we dont have line of sight to the Tx/Rx station.)
Just to cap it all and as if to disprove my earlier thoughts about throttling and or bandwidth limitations I switched on about an hour ago (10 am local) and did a speedtest using speedtest.net and got a disappointingly low 200kbps down and 400 up. Considering it should be in the region of 3-4Mbps down / 512Kbps up its all a bit frustrating.
Gonna have to put up with it for the moment. T'fonica's normal response time is 48hrs. If nothing happens I'll go through the whole reporting thing again via a 'snottygram' direct to their Customers Services Management office.