Slow speeds since moving to Virgin

I've tried posting this on the Virgin support forums but don't seem to be really getting much help...

I switched to Virgin ADSL 10MB when I moved into my new house a month ago, and since moving in the broadband has been fairly poor speed-wise and connection-wise. Every evening the speed slows to a crawl, and most evenings the connection drops at least once. A reboot of the router seems to temporarily fix things, but the speeds still barely scrape over 2MB.

I'm 0.8 miles from the nearest exchange as the crow flies.

I've tried running the speedtester.bt.com test but I get an error message each time. It says 'The Performance Tester is currently unable to run a speed test for your broadband connection. Please try again shortly, however if this problem persists, raise the issue with your service provider.'

I've tried most hours since yesterday morning and still get the same error message. I've tried on Mac and Windows 7, and on Safari, Firefox and IE8.

Can anyone help?

I moved away from Virgin Media because of peak time congestion, I have a 18meg line but during peak it would go down to 2. Since moving to sky I get 18meg all day long.

If C&W LLU is available at your exchange then Viirgin will be using that, as they run the ADSL service for them.

Virgin National is well known for being highly contended i.e. slow at peak times, general advice is don't buy it.

Ahhh I've just done a search of exchanges and it turns out I'm on a different one than I was at my previous address despite being in the same city. I'm on the Ribbleton one now, whereas I was previously on the Ashton-on-Ribble one. Both have C&W LLU.

Cheers for the info

speedtester.bt.com will not work for you if you are on C&W LLU, its only for BT ADSL and FTTC
Virgin ADSL are deservedly bottom of the list here
http://www.dslzoneuk.net/isp_ratings.php