If you are hearing crackling on your line there is a very good chance you have an HR (high resistance) connection somewhere, water ingress being the most likely culprit, probably in the DP on the pole. If that happens the impedance of the line will increase and the signal-to-noise ratio get worse, in effect meaning worse reception with lots more noise over the top causing your modem to throw a wobbler. Of course the problem is that because of BT's stranglehold on the network if you ask for a line test you'll likely get an un-asked-for BT visit and a hefty BT charge (£120?) when they declare their network is perfect, something the regulators need to change. If you put a voltmeter across the BT line pair you may in fact see the voltage swinging about from the standard 50v dc showing a line fault.

As an aside, I don't know if some of you are aware that all modems are not equal. Ages ago when I had my previous BT brand ASDL modem on my newly upgraded ADSL2 line I was still getting a maximum of 8Megabits/sec. It wasn't until I was reading my modem manual that I suddenly realised my existing modem maxed out at 8Mb/s. I bought a new TP-Link modem designed for ADSL2 and bam, instant 16Mb/s. So if some of you are using old modems you may need to upgrade to a better modem, you might suddenly see a much better speed!

You're not the only one with this problem. I didn't get great results on the C&W ADSL24 packages, but switched early last year to their £18.90/month LLU package (believe it was BT?) and was getting these results: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Now I'm lucky to get 6Mbps down and 0.45Mbps up, even having requested the line profile be reduced to 9db. Surfing is slow esp in the evenings. I'd like to hear from Coms.com about this.