Hi Noppix1!

Thank you for that valuable nugget of info, a very interesting suggestion, and one that I will definitely bear in mind as an option, especially if FTTC is not an option or if putting in the ADSL line would prove undue hassle. I do however worry slightly that 10 mbps is going to be a little low on bandwidth for the three (albeit light) users in this household...

Yes, the VM Superhub router/modem combination has been replaced with every move. Sadly there was no improvement.

Hey Noppix1,

Thank you for sharing your experience, and for your input on delayed v dropped packets - I had wondered why I wasn't seeing any packet loss, as to my somewhat simplistic non-IT mind the symptoms of packet loss always sounded like the issues I was having. I would love for a similar result following ISP change, but need to check out availability of FTTC services, otherwise I may consider trying a move to Docsis 2 as suggested by yourself further down the thread.

Having a consistent IP address does not really concern me too much, so BT may well be an option. Thanks for this!

In reply to a post by mjws2:

Hi Noppix1!

Thank you for that valuable nugget of info, a very interesting suggestion, and one that I will definitely bear in mind as an option, especially if FTTC is not an option or if putting in the ADSL line would prove undue hassle. I do however worry slightly that 10 mbps is going to be a little low on bandwidth for the three (albeit light) users in this household...

To be honest 10Mbit is a lot and unless you have a household of internet nutter like I do you will be fine.
An average netflix stream is quoted as being 2.8gig per hour for HD, That amounts to 0.77 meg per second.
Unless you are going to be download a free issue of Linux every day it would be more than enough data for any light user, and, on top of that the ping would be so low that browsing would be lighting fast.
Worth a try and a much better situation than an ADSL line.
Hope it all works out for you

It is a shame it has come to this for VM as like I say for years they were on top and never failed to impress me. Just when you thought you had the fastest connection in the country they would double the speed for free. But now it seems that they have reached the end of the road by way of being amazing as this (wv10) area has had speed issues now for over 3 Years. They have also announced another speed increase (double)for this area so my guess would be that the problem will also double when that happens.
I never did like the traffic management much though, I must add that, and the up speed has always been rubbish.

In reply to a post by Zadeks:

That isn't a normal plusnet connection.

ADSL or VDSL?
How often is the connection left idle?

Unfortunately,it is normal to me... it has been like that since Plusnet set me up on a static IP to keep an eye on it (beginning of November last year) and probably for a while before that since it has been problematic for a while now.
It is on ADSL.
What do you mean by idle? It is pretty much always on and in use for browsing at least.

What's the sync speed?

You will see high latency and packet loss if you saturate the connection.

The other PN graphs look nothing like yours does. http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/

5280 Kbps Data Rate. The connection is not being saturated.
The other PN graphs for the package and Exchange technology are exactly like mine.. thanks for bringing my attention to that. http://community.plus.net/ping-graphs/#unlimited20CN

Though I appreciate your help.. we are wandering off topic. I just wanted to make sure the OP didn't assume that a move of ISP will necessarily end up with a better connection, which since most of them will tie you into a year or more long contract, is something to make bear in mind.

I'm afraid a lot of webpages will saturate a 5Mb connection these days.

One graph is a little similar, but we don't know how much the individual is utilising his connection, etc.

You should check the VP capacity. http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/

I apologise for the act of thread necromancy, but I thought this may be useful for somebody in the same situation. Alas, here is my Ping Monitor following my move to Plusnet on a 16 mbps ADSL connection. While the ping monitor does not actually look that much better, my problems of intermittent connection loss have been resolved - thus I am very happy with my move. Peak download speeds are slightly lower, but then I don't use P2P and thus rarely see download speeds higher than about 4mbps anyway since these appear to be capped serverside. Upload speeds are quite slow which makes videochat suboptimal, but continuous lower quality is preferable in my opinion to wildly fluctuating speeds.

tl; dnr: I am happy - thanks all for the advice!