No it is a normal master socket, just the interstitial plate (the bit where the RJ11 lead plugs in) came area first in your case.

http://www.coolwebhome.co.uk/faceplate/ shows the way the small front half should come off.

But as others said it was enough to do what you did anyway.

No dial tone from any extension, so pretty sure there's nothing coming off the incoming pair before the test socket.

I managed to find a pic of my stats from back when I was getting 1.875Mps: http://i.imgur.com/hMisIJy.jpg

Guessing there's nothing more I can do then?

Sadly we've been left out of both BDUK and commercial FTTC rollout, despite our best efforts (www.cheltenham151.com)

Ah, thanks for that. Mine felt pretty stuck together and didn't fancy pulling too hard on it!

If you have one of those types of modem/routers where you can hack the target SNR margin you might squeeze another 0.5 mbps (at the possible expense of stability), but I rather think you are in the realms of requiring an uplift to the local BB infrastructure.,

In reply to a post by TheEulerID:

The slightly higher connection speed had a lower noise margin.

This may be a silly question, but the original stats had a lower noise margin but lower speed. Does lower noise margin not always mean higher speed?

Original Noise Margin.......: 3.4 - 1.625 Mbps
Test Socket Noise Margin..: 6.3 - 1.656 Mbps
Back in normal socket......: 5.4 - 1.688 Mbps
Stats from a while ago.....: 4.2 - 1.875 Mbps

Not always, the figures are very much a capture from a moment in time, so if there was a burst of noise when syncing you can have a low noise margin and lower speeds, when the noise goes away this may be reflected by you having a higher SNR figure.

On long lines like yours the signal is so weak that it may not take much variation in noise to cause a variation in connection speed. Even the choice of ADSL modem and firmware its running will have an effect.

Until recently I had an ADSL connection on a very long line.. its attenuation on downstream was in about 62db and that could get 3-400kbps so I would certainly say something is up outside the property.

I may have said it before.

Lower margin may mean higher headline or sync speed however it may also mean significantly more errors and thus a lower actual speed.

further my previous post regarding the lack of speed on your line, I have dug up some old diagnostics data from my old ADSL1 connection, it follows!

Mode: ADSL_G.dmt
Traffic Type: ATM
Status: Up
Link Power State: L0

Downstream Upstream
Line Coding(Trellis): On On
SNR Margin (0.1 dB): 38 60
Attenuation (0.1 dB): 595 315
Output Power (0.1 dBm): 181 124
Attainable Rate (Kbps): 4,848 996

Path 0 Path 1
Downstream Upstream Downstream Upstream
Rate (Kbps): 4,320 832 0 0

K (number of bytes in DMT frame): 136 27 0 0
R (number of check bytes in RS code word): 4 8 0 0
S (RS code word size in DMT frame): 1.00 4.00 0.0 0.0
D (interleaver depth): 16 4 0 0
Delay (msec): 4.00 4.00 0.0 0.0
INP (DMT symbol): 0.23 0.11 0.0 0.0

Super Frames: 44,899 44,899 0 0
Super Frame Errors: 42 1 0 0
RS Words: 3,053,132 763,045 0 0
RS Correctable Errors: 20,125 1 0 0
RS Uncorrectable Errors: 276 0 0 0

HEC Errors: 92 0 0 0
OCD Errors: 0 0 0 0
LCD Errors: 0 0 0 0
Total Cells: 7,776,749 0 0 0
Data Cells: 283,832 0 0 0
Bit Errors: 0 0 0 0

Total ES: 20 0
Total SES: 0 0
Total UAS: 0 0

Thanks for all the replies.

The connection has now, annoyingly, dropped to 1.5Mbps, not sure why as nothings changed.

Are there any recommended routers / modems that work better on longer lines / allow the hacking of the SNR Margin as mentioned?