Will we ever..

get ADSL2 or VDSL (aka infinity) where i live?!

(Leeswood)

8mb is great but 448k upload is not.. and with 4 ppl in the house that all use the net at the same time a few hours a day the lack in speed is showing!

Second line?

Or Max Premium for better upstream.

we are with BT .. how would one go about getting the faster upload?

As Mr.S said, two lines, and a load balancing router.

But we are not rich

To get the higher upstream, you could look and see if your isp (or a suitable alternative) can offer adsl max premium; this puts your upload up to a maximum of 832kbit. It also has the advantage of giving you a higher priority at the exchange, so if you're on a congested virtual path at the exchange you should see better performance compared to the standard package - this only matters if the vp is congested though!

This solution only will help you if you're suffering through a lack of upstream. You could look at what's being done on the broadband and change your habits; download big files overnight or when you're out, download programs in advance from Iplayer rather than streaming them. Alternatively you could look at using a router with qos, allowing you to prioritize web browsing above downloads for example.

The problem is, we have 4 ppl in the house that use the internet.

One of us uses skype a lot of the time to talk to about 3-4 ppl at once and that just eats up the upload and causes the rest of us major lag in games that we play in the evening.

unfortunately gaming even if just two of you are playing is going to see an increase in lag. Just sort out a time to limit the guy on skype and when you can game. I can't see any other 'cheap' way.

Sounds a lot like QOS would help. Failing that, find out if the person using Skype is the one hosting the conference call; the host of the conference call is the one communicating with all other call participants, thus requiring hefty chunks of upstream. See if someone else can be the one to start the call, that might help out.

Equally, it could be that your bandwidth requirements fall within what your line is capable of, BUT your ISP is sluggish in the evenings - what ISP are you with?

If only one of you is gaming does the line perform OK? Are you also certain that nobody is torrenting or otherwise battering the connection?

OP said BT!

For better upstream speed, ask your ISP if they offer the 832Kbit speed on any of their packages though often there is an extra cost for this (or there used to be, it is a while since I upgraded beyond 8Mbit so things may have changed) as it was usually a feature of more business oriented connections.

Line bonding is an option, but an expensive and not so efficient one, so even if there is a bump in price of 832K up you'll find that preferable financially if upstream speed is your main issue.

If you are Linux literate you could try putting a small box (one of those little low-power "plug PC" units would do fine, or some routers with custom firmware will do the job too) then you could try something like this. That is an old reference, but still relevant. This is a slightly more recent example. The key is limiting the amount of upstream bandwidth larger and/or bulk packets are permitted to use (fair apportioning of that allocation is a secondary task and may be a complexity you don't need) so that smaller packets (the packet acknowledgements and other such, delays to which are what cause everything to get throttled when one or both directions are saturated) to slip through quicker - as such pre-made scripts like this may be all you need. Wondershaper is a common option in this regard and is included in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories: http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/wondershaper

Of course you could just get a private circuit installed, but as you said elsewhere that you don't want to bond two lines because of cost I'm guessing ~9K/yr for a 10Mbit (both ways) link is out of the question!