Better connectors?

Hi,

I joined Zen on Tuesday from plusnet and I'm loving it - everything works as its supposed to, just like in the early days of my plusnet connection.
I've also noticed that my sync speed is slightly up as well, is there any feasible reason for that?

Due to living so far from the exchange I'm limited to a 512k connection, but with MAX my sync speed jumped to anwhere between 900 and 1050kbps, not quite enough for a 1 meg connection.
Now with Zen I seem to be on 1120kbps, still not quite enough. Am I right in thinking I need to sync at 2*576 = 1152kbps to get 1 meg?

My router is connected to the only phone socket in the house, using a proper faceplate fitted by an engineer, so there's no filter. Is there anything I can do to improve the connection, such as buying a gold-plated modem line or something?
My router is a Netgear DG834G by the way.

No point in gold plated cables when the signal has just passed through 3 miles of copper.

That's what I thought, but if it really is only a matter of getting another 32kbps somehow, then I thought maybe better quality connectors, or maybe even a better modem might help.

It's not just about getting an extra 32kbps though, you really need to improve the line by a larger margin to allow for variations in line quality.

You could try removing the faceplate and connecting directly to the socket behind it using an old modem lead or a RJ11 to BT convertor.

I have heard that the speedtouch routers give better synch speed so if you could borrow one of them might be worth a try. I also use a Netgear DG834G and it gives better synch speed than Draytek, Zyxel and the cheap Connextant models but I have not tried it against a Speedtouch

Any modem which can be used with the DMT program from www.mhilfe.de might help to do some fine tuning. I now use Speedtouch 546 V5's which seem to do the job very well, certainly better then the Connexant and D-Links that I tried before.