Poor speeds and line quality - need advice

Hi - I am a Xilo customer, who migrated from Namesco due to poor speeds and random disconnects.

When I fist joined Namesco a few years ago 6MB was always fine, and it never disconnected. This slowly got worse until I was being disconnected all the time and my speed fluctuated between 1MB and 6MB daily.

I joined Xilo to see if it was the service provider, and initially (for a couple of months) everything was much better - solid reliability and faster speeds, but again it's now the slippery path to unworkable speed and being disconnected all the time.

So - I went out and brought a new modem / router and have installed that - but it is still the same and still poor (and getting worse by the day).

I have tried it directly connected, and it different sockets - makes no difference.

I feel I have done everything possible, changing hosts, buying new equipment, testing on different sockets, and different computers so I am at a loss as to what to do next.

I have of course been in touch with my service provider, but they say it's my modem and router - the old one and the new one have "bad chips" - they suggest buying a third modem / router and using that.

So I'd really like a second opinion before I go and buy more stuff.

I have tested my router in a neighbors house and it didn't effect their speeds so I know it's not broken. But admitedly I am a bit of a noob.

I have run the BT Speedster test and that is here: http://b.imagehost.org/view/0514/Screen_shot_2010-10...

My router stats are here:

Downstream: 7616kbps /448 kbps
Line Attenuation: 11.5 db / 5.5 db
Noise Margin: 12.5 db /26 db

Equipment I have is ZyXEl 660R & Netgear WPN824 Rangemax. And the new one I brought is the Netgear DG834.

The BT speed test shows your profile as 3000 kbps which suggests you have recently synced at less than 3424kbps. May I suggest you download RouterStats and use it to monitor your connection for several days. This might reveal a pattern. See http://www.vwlowen.co.uk/internet/files.htm

Thankfully not many tickets with the same modem/combo as you.

You're dropping sync to a lower rate, which means the IP profile will follow.

We've recommended a different router with a broadcom chipset as they tend to be a lot more reliable than the AR7/Connexant routers you have currently tested.

I have tested my router in a neighbors house and it didn't effect their speeds so I know it's not broken. But admitedly I am a bit of a noob.

Could be for many reasons; difference in line quality, less noise/interference during the short time it was tested and so on.

One thing that was also discussed is that one of your devices is logging out of the service every 5 minutes which looks like some sort of idle time out. This won't affect the sync rate but may help for diagnosis to disable any idle timeout so we can see when/if any drops occur.

Matt