Major speed problems

About three weeks ago I moved into my new place, which I'm sharing with 3 others, and the broadband is provided by Virgin (I'm fairly certain it's Virgin ADSL).

The speed is absolutely atrocious. At best it's 2mbps, at worst (95% of the time) it's 0.5mbps.

The broadband is provided as part of the rent I pay, so I have no control over which ISP we have, but I complained about the speed to the landlord who said he'd look into it. Yesterday he phoned Virgin and "upgraded" the package, which seemed to solve the problem as I was happily surfing away at 8mbps.

However, that only lasted for about four hours. Since then it's been between 0.5-2mpbs. I've tried resetting the router but that doesn't help.

When it's down to 0.5mpbs the internet is pretty much unusable for anything even remotely intensive. iPlayer, Youtube, etc are all no-go areas for me while it's being this slow.

I can't contact Virgin directly as the account isn't in my name, but their level of service is utterly unacceptable.

Can anyone shed any light on why my speeds are so poor?

Can you post the line stats reported by the router?

When its bad are you 100% sure the others arent doing stuff, remember an unattended PC can still be downloading/uploading stuff.

If this is congestion, as oppossed to a wobbly phone line, then you'd expect speeds to be reasonable around 1am to 9am.

Remember also with Virgin ADSL traffic management is used, so with a few users on the line, you may be making this kick in almost every day.