For what it�s worth, both pings and speeds returned to normal at around 5 pm yesterday. I had to go out again so I didn�t have time to monitor and try to correlate broadband and tennis. The women�s Final later might aid diagnostics.

As for the upgrade, I think I�m going to wait a while. There doesn�t seem to be that �Wow!� factor that, despite problems, was obvious when I moved to Max as a Zen customer or, in fact, when I was with BT Internet and 512 kbps when to 1 and then 2 mbps.

In reply to Vorlon, there have been some 'blips' in the quality of service lately:

About a month ago there was a fault on gw6 that caused some users to have terrible download speeds, Idnet support redistributed them to a different BT central within a day. BT fixed the problem a week later.

Last week several users on gw5, myself included, suffered from high pings (150ms+) during this year's Wimbledon tournament (to be fair other ISPs had similar problems), although it seems the issue is still persisting for some users, so no idea what is at fault there.

I believe the people on 21CN (once their new connection settles) are the best off, as they've been unaffected by Wimbledon and continue to have lower pings than those on us still on adsl max products.