It's getting worse!

[#1]

As a Linux user, I regularly download fairly large binaries from various sites throughout the world.
Many months ago, I could download from any of them at a speed of about 850KB/s in a morning, occasionally dropping to about 750 in the afternoon and evening.
Then, a few months later, the afternoon speed dropped to about 500 - 600 KB/s. No problem with that.
That didn't last long. The morning speed was the same, but the afternoon speed suddenly became 30KB/s. I raised a ticket and did all the obligatory tests. PN told me that 'this was to be expected and was caused by server overload'. (Servers from all over the world, all throttling their speed at exactly the same time to exactly the same amount?)
So, I abandoned doing any serious downloading during the afternoon, and even abandoned my daily webcam chat with a  friend.
Foolishly, yesterday afternoon, I tried to do a download of a binary which was several hundred megabytes long. For the first few  few minutes, I was getting a speed of around 500KB/s. "Great", I thought, "The speed problems seem to have been sorted". But no! The speed suddenly dropped to 25KB/s for about three minutes. Then it dropped again to a 'magnificent' 3KB/s, where it stayed. At this speed, it was going to take well over a day to download the file. So I abandoned it.
I went to the website again this morning to check what speed I could get. 707KB/s! A bit of a difference from 3! It's the best download speed I have seen for months!
I wonder how people can watch videos on-line at a speed of 3KB/s? Of course they can't. So others must not have the same problems as me.
There appear to be moves afoot to increase the available broadband speed from exchange to subscriber. But I do think that the speed we are 'supposed' to be able to get now, should be sorted first.
Nothing has changed this end to cause the excessive fluctuations in speed and the general speed drop, so I can only assume that it is something external. Here, it's one computer, no fax, no Sky, no Christmas lights, only me uses the computer, no wi-fi, modem is on all day and is only switched off if we go out or at bedtime.
Sorry about the rant, but I'm feeling very frustrated!
I'm making a hard copy of James' write-up on broadband problems, and will read it.
Cheers
Keith.

[#2]

Hi Keith,
Sorry about the hassle over this. I've had a look at your account, in particular the connection logs, and I can see a number of disconnections due to lost carrier - in essence it seems you have an intermittent sync fault which will certainly cause the sorts of issues you have been seeing.
I'd recommend having a look at your connection logs to confirm this (it might be that you're powering down manually, but it doesn't look like it from our logs). If it is an intermittent connection, test it from the master socket with all your other things plugged into the phone line removed and if it's still dropping raise us a fault at http://faults.plus.net.
If you drop a post in here when that's done I'll take a look at it, run a line test and let you know what we're seeing.
Hope that helps,

[#3]

Hello Orbrey.
Thanks for your reply.
I don't disconnect the router manually, only switching it off after I have closed the computer down.
My knowledge of networking is almost non-existent, but you say that it looks as though I have an intermittent connection. So, what I would like to do is to run things for a couple of days using my old SMC router and see what happens regarding speed. That will check if there is a problem with this Netgear DG834 router.
If there are still problems, I'll move the computer downstairs and plug it directly into the master socket as you say. We only have two phone sockets, the master line box downstairs and the extension upstairs, which BT installed three years ago and is hard wired into the master socket.
Will be in touch and thanks again.
Keith

[#4]

Excellent, many thanks. Please let us know how the testing goes and we'll pick it up from there - trying alternative hardware is definitely a good idea.