In reply to a post by CHBMB:

Thanks, what is the silver coating for and what's it's purpose?

It's to inhibit corrosion/oxidisation of the copper.
Aluminium has never been used for overhead wires, as it lacks the mechanical strength and pliability needed when the cable moves in the wind.

In reply to a post by CHBMB:

This seems to indicate that my downstream noise margin is the issue.

The issue is that the DSL modulation is g.dmt - ADSL.

Well I'm assuming that it's the dropwire. It comes from the telegraph pole outside my house then goes into the soffetts, next place I can see the wire is a black wire coming up from the skirting board inside my hallway.

It's black with four wires within.

White - Connected to A
Orange - Connected to B
Green - Not connected
Black - Not connected

It doesn't look in the best nick as there's about three inches of each wire that was crammed into the BT80a and certainly not twisted.

What they said, you need to switch to auto mode or adsl2+ to boost your speeds

Given my line stats, is it worth it?

I have spent hours on the phone to BT in the last few weeks, are there any magic words or numbers to use to convince them to attempt to change my profile?

I'v already been through the process once with them but nothing changed...

In reply to a post by CHBMB:

Given my line stats, is it worth it?

Yes, your attenuation is very low = good.

Thats dropwire 10 , copper.

So at present I'm on ADSL, the bit that I got confused about was in my original thread MrSaffron posted this

on the ADSL caps the upload is capped at 448 Kbps

although this was in response to another poster's comment not mine.

Why would BT put me on ADSL if ADSL2+ is available?

Is it possible that I went up to ADSL2+ and been put back down again?
I ask this because for a while my line was very unstable and dropped connection several times a night but this now seems to have settled down.

Ali was used on overhead cables back in the day. The conductors are never under tension. the 'strength' is in the suspension wire. It was never used in dropwires though. The OP has tinned copper.

It is odd for them to force the modulation mode, what ADSL hardware are you actually using on the line?