I think you are telling porkies, Batty.
Porkies doesn't help the OP and is not honest.
TBH I would have thought you especially would recognise 0808 101 3430 and 0203 393 5181 as UK phone numbers 
The Callcentre is in Sofia Bulgaria,
I'd also like to point out the number of exchanges on a single link is largely irrelevant from a capacity point of view (Although I would think you'd not want to many on a single link as that would be a single point of failure), what actually matters is the number of users on that link their speeds and their usage profiles. You could have a lot of exchanges but with a low user density and it wouldn't saturate the link.
Where as a single exchange full of people who download 10GB game downloads regularly would obviously need a higher capacity link between the exchange and the rest of the network.
Usually BE's service is usually pretty good and most people will get a stable unthrottled connection with a decent ping.
However BE do seem to run into congestion issues every now and again where they haven't seemingly provisioned enough capacity in a particular area to meet the increased demand and lately the problem seems to be on some of their peering/transit links which means it affects everyone who routes over that link to reach the wider internet.
They're also not doing themselves any favors by the lack of clear concise updates on why the issue occurred and what they're doing to rectify it.
I think the best way to describe BE is for the most part a fairly decent unthrottled ADSL2+ service but unfortunately with some rough edges.
I also believe that the Best ISP for gaming will vary depending on Locality and also the usage profile of the person taking the service.
Edited by dragon2611 (Sun 13-Nov-11 23:15:24)