Sloooooooooooooooooow Speed

Got roped in to looking at a problem with a friends BT broadband. Been running ok for a while but now the download speeds are rubbish and frequently just grinds to a halt.
Testing from the test socket with the BT home hub and a Voyager 210 gives pretty much the same results.
I didn't take notes on the exact figures but they were something like down attenuation 40dB, noise 0dB, sync speed 576, actual download speed 126kbps (that was using BTspeedtester). Now with those stats I would have expected a much higher sync speed, maybe up to 4meg.
Strangley, Samknows reports some odd looking results for the number, it says that 256kbps may be possible with an engineer visit, even though they are less than a mile from the exchange. If I put the phone number into the Freedom2Surf website checker it comes back with a speed of 2.4Mb.
Apparently Openreach have had a guy out to check the line and he could find nothing wrong other than he reckoned the line was capped at 576 even though it is capable of more and he would contact BT to get them to lift the cap. I believe he saw the same sort of figures for attenuation and noise.
Now, the question is, why is the download speed to poor at all times of the day? Is there a cap on the cap? How does my friend go about getting this fixed? They've already spoken to BT Broadband and the person they spoke to agreed that the speed was awful and the Openreach engineer had reported there was a cap and it was removed. She was told the speed would improve over the weekend but as of last night it was still the same, still syncing at 576 and still downloading at dial up speeds. Anyone got any recommendations on how to progress?

Just tried putting in the postcode and missing out the telephone number and the BT checker says that the line should support 5meg or greater! Any idea why there should be such a huge difference when I also use the telephone number?

Edited by deleted (Tue 31-Aug-10 11:58:17)

In reply to a post by killie99:

I didn't take notes on the exact figures but they were something like down attenuation 40dB, noise 0dB, sync speed 576, actual download speed 126kbps (that was using BTspeedtester). Now with those stats I would have expected a much higher sync speed, maybe up to 4meg.

Why?

With those stats 40dB atten and 0dB noise I would have expected to see the low figure you have recorded. Resolve te noise problem - if you can and it will improve but if te noise is external then you have little chance.

So was the Openreach guy talking nonsense when he said the noise margin was ok?
I thought on a fixed rate line (which this appears to be) the noise margin had to be below around 10dB to function or have I got that completely round the wrong way?

fixed rate would be 288 upload thats how you tell, if i was you i would post the router stats so we can give you a better idea of what is going on.