I can't believe i lost four years to that thing...

[#1]

Today I replaced my Thomson 585 router with a D-Link I found in a bin. OMG.
Turns out for the last four years I'd been mistakenly blaming my crappy rural copper telephone wires for the rubbish speed and constant drop outs. Today my download speeds went from around 1.5mb to nearly 3mb and my upload speed doubled - and stable! I can play Minecraft with no lag! I can stream video. I'm so happy!
Weeeeee!
The message here is, if you're still using a thomson, check your bin in case there's a better router in there!

[#2]

Yup,
I too have just come to the same conclusion that the best place for a TG585 on the end of a 2k+ line is in the bin. What's the DLink you found?

[#3]

It's a D-link DSL-2640R, oldish I guess but it works a treat 

[#4]

I hate to do a "me too", but I also found the TG585 (v7) the worst of all routers I've tried.
The last time I tried it was a couple of years ago and it could only manage to sync at around 1300-1400kbps whereas swapping for a Netgear DG834Gv2, DG834Gv4 or 2wire 2700HGV pushed the rate up to around 1900-2100kbps range (or higher, at times).
I'm not sure why it performs so poorly, the chipset is sound (Broadcom something) so maybe the other frontend components aren't quite as good as they could be. One thing I did notice was that the power supply kicked out a fair amount of interference, and moving it as far away from the router itself (and any telephone-related stuff - cables, micro-filters, sockets) helped. But even at its best a 1400kbps sync was all it could manage.
I'm sure on a shorter line it works well enough but for my long line it isn't really up to the job.

[#5]

Not sure it's just the Thompson - I've recently bought another Belkin and the same has happened - my download speed is now 5.3kbps as opposed to 3.5 and my upload has increased by 2/3rds.

[#6]

I wonder with the various complaints about routers, it does not come down as much to personal set ups and location characteristics, which can be estremly varied, and quality control at the manufacturers.
Realistically, the cost of a run of mill router is around 2 very modest theatre tickets: I reckon the trade almost view them as disposables.
At 2.6 kms from exchange (road) I am getting ~8000 kbps @ 47 dB att. and 3 dB SNRM with no problems of range and other matters with the 582N.
In all everyone's expereience with any machine is different, C'est la vie!