Terrible Quality, RH6 area

Hi,
We've been with Virgin Media for about 3.5 years now, in the RH6 (Horley, Surrey) area. In the last few weeks the once solid connection has been terrible. Websites drop out randomly and downloads stop and don't resume.

If downloading through Firefox, when it gets stuck, pausing and resuming the download suddenly kicks it back to life at top speed, then slows after a few seconds, as if when it first hung the download was being buffered somewhere but stopped getting through to here.

Its getting really frustrating and I was wondering if anyone else has been suffering?

I've tried the obvious things like power cycling the modem (the free one we got when joining up, the black scientific atlanta thing).

Hopefully someone else is in your area and can comment.

I recently looked into a fault with my parents cable modem and it turned out to be a very low SNR coupled with an absolutely ancient cable modem (think one of the first ntl models - was mine a long, long time ago!) - the issue could have been there for years as they hardly used it.

I googled how to get into the router settings (got the model number from Windows device manager) and that's how I discovered that particular issue (SNR down to about 23)

I then posted on the Virgin Media customer forum on my parents behalf, they took the info at face value, popped round a couple of days later - replaced modem and sorted out fluctuating SNR (which caused drop outs as it was going so low) and that solved it.

Might be worth seeing if you can see anything in the router stats perhaps.