AOL.........HA

[#1]

My mates mum just moved into a new flat and got AOL broadband. I did tell my friend about plusnet's 1 month contracts and he did tell her but by the time she moved in they were gone!!!!!! 

Anyhoo, NO JOKE she is less than 50 metres from the exchange, its literally across the road, you can see it from the window. And AOL's impressive 8MB line is delivering download spees of around 50KBps - 70KBps (downloaded CCleaner). I am 300-400 metres from the exchange and i get th full 8MB that ISP's dish out.
So i suppose my question is.....
This whole 10 day line stabilization poeriod, is it alot of crap? or will they jump from 'Normal Broadband' to 8MB goodness!! in due course!
On a side note, her acer laptop wont let me connect to the Thomson Router using anying but WEP encryption, maybe they know its so sloooww no-one will want to steal it!!!
night dudes

[#2]

There are 2 obvious questions:
1. What are the stats from her router?
2. What is her extension wiring like?
The commonest cause of such problems is "inappropriate" phone wiring in the home. 
(and download tests are notoriously inaccurate)

[#3]

AOL use a strange MTU setting on the router if this isnt set all sorts of strange things happen the router should be set to 1400 MTU

[#4]

Not even looked at the router settings yet, going back tonight to have a look at the wireless problem so will  maybe have a look then. As for the wiring the house is about 50-60 years newer than mine so i would hope that its just fine 
Will also change the MTU setting and report back!
Thanks folks