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about 1.8km from the exchange.

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Based purely on straight line distance? If so then you could perhaps add another Km or so due to the way that BT route their local loop.

Guess wise for 2.8 (taking into account the above) then 5.5 is fairly accurate, the real determining factor will be your telephone lines "Downstream Attenuation". Ideally it wants to be low for fast speeds, and this can depend on the condition of the telephone wires, distance from exchange, RF interference, etc..

If it's below the old 2Mbit threshold of 46db then you should be good to go, however if your above that and near the mid 50's (like myself) then you'll only get around 1.5Mbit (stable) and higher results in even less.

Still does not explain why i get 0.5Mbps though. Hope it is a glitch in the system (or matrix, however you look at it)

Nothing much I can do now except to stress out and wait.

Still dont understand why when I was with Virgin Media, I keep getting Error 691: invalid username/password when everything was keyed in correctly.

Grrr. previous experience with broadband ISPs have been flawless. Now all this is happening. Why can't it be straightforward.

Hope I didnt make a mistake to go with BT. but I figured, I only have 1 company to deal with when problems come up, as opposed to dealing with 2 seperate companies blaming each other.

Were you on cable with Virgin media for broadband ?.

Nope. Not cable. My area is in a non-cable area. So I got the std broadband via a BT phoneline.

I hope you get better than the 0.5Mbps. But despite the views of some, I believe that you've made a sensible choice by going to BT
If you encounter problems you'd be wise to follow the advice of some of the knowledgeable members such as MrSaffron, beerhunter, paulbeattie etc in your dealings with BT.
A relative kept a detailed log of router stats and speedtester results on a spreadsheet when he encountered problems and this provided useful evidence to get the fault escalated and speedily fixed free of charge. Being polite but assertive with BT really works!

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Still does not explain why i get 0.5Mbps though. Hope it is a glitch in the system (or matrix, however you look at it)

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So your BT ADSL is live this very minute? If so then post your stats from your modem / router so that we can see if there is a cause for your 512Kb connection.

So it was ADSL then ? - what speeds did you get with Virgin Media or was it just plain old 512kb ?

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Hope I didnt make a mistake to go with BT. but I figured, I only have 1 company to deal with when problems come up, as opposed to dealing with 2 seperate companies blaming each other.

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As far as I am aware BT Retail have no more clout with BT Openreach than any other ISP. At least that is what the BT Openreach engineer told me when we had him round earlier this year.

Regards,
Steve

Take a look at the Vigin forum for potential speeds!

Put it this way, some think BT is slow - according to some reports that I've read here and also from other forum members at some IT forums that I visit, the speeds at times are even worse than the 'Throttled' BT users.

Nope. I just (this afternoon) placed my order with BT. When I keyed in my phone number (online) before ordering, their initial broadband speed returned 0.5Mbps when yesterday it was 5.5Mbps. I then telephoned BT querying this before placing the order and they said that they are also getting 0.5Mbps at their end, following inital checks. They also said that an engineer would be sent out to sort it out (at no cost, although not sure whether the engineer would come to my house, or just to the exchange)

When I was with virgin, I could hardly get online due to invalid username and password. And when I managed to, It was 460kbps (from memory) but it was within the 10 days "training period". Funny thing was when the adsl modem (Speedtouch USB) was reset, I would loose connection with Virgin and get the "invalid username and password" error again. Various calls to them proved futile, as they kept taking me through the same "troubleshoot" steps. They also said there was no problem with my line and my login, but there clearly was, so I gave up and cancelled. (they were good enough not to charge me anything except for the monthly charge, pro-rata-ed.