Broadband Service Outage - Cheltenham

[#1]

I've checked the scheduled maintenance for my area (Cheltenham), and according to the timetable, the work should take place overnight tonight.
However, my broadband has been down since at least 5.30pm last night and continues to be down.
Can you explain this, please?

[#2]

I'm in Cheltenham, my connection was working fine last night and at least up til 7 this morning.
Where did you find out about the maintenance scheduled?

[#3]

The maintenance is BTWholesale maintenance and only happens from Midnight - 6am, this will generally only cause a few minutes downtime if any. If you were down before this or after this then it's very unlikely to be the maintenance causing the problem.
It's worth checking out troubleshooting and reporting as a fault if that doesn't help.
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/bbfaults/
https://faults.plus.net

[#4]

Broadband is now back on, but running at an abysmal speed. It's slower than I remember dial-up to be. I tried a speed test yesterday, but it barely registered and had a ping in the 400s.
Now, on the troubleshooter I've reached the part about testing the dial tone. Unfortunately, I don't have a landline phone at home, because it's 2015 and I'm under forty.
Is there is any way of checking my broadband connection without checking the dial tone?

[#5]

We can test the line however if there is any noise on the phone line this is likely to cause issues with the broadband. If the fault got to a stage where we sent an engineer and they identified the issue was caused by internal equipment, then a charge would be applied at that point, testing with a phone is a good way to making sure the line isn't causing an issue.
Looking at the line it was disconnecting a fair bit:

Testing the phone line shows an external fault, so at the moment no engineer is required and I've raised that to Openreach.