BigJeffIE

The first thing to try if you're having internet problems is to unplug all the other devices that use your telephone line. Telephones, faxes, Sky boxes etc. If you have a house alarm with phone monitoring the quick and dirty installation is to connect the alarm up into your phone line before it gets to your main phone point in the house. If it doesn't have a proper filter it can really lower the amount of internet bandwidth you receive. As an example, when I finally got 24Mb broadband in my house I was only getting 5-6Mb. I found the sky box (the older type with phone line connection) was causing 4-5Mb of loss and and after temporarily disconnecting the house alarm another 4-5Mb loss. Taking those two devices off the line put the broadband up to 16Mb download speed. I rang the house alarm people and they came out to fit a filter and make adjustments to the wiring. To check to see if things improve you need to access your routers admin page through a web browser and monitor what it's telling you. If you don't want to do that you can use a webpage like http://www.speedtest.net to get a pretty accurate picture. If you have broadband installed and now it's stopped working then there is a problem. They wouldn't have installed it in the first place if you were "too far from the exchange" it shouldn't just stop working! Edit - Also forgot to mention extension leads and splitters. if you're using either of those with your router try swapping them out or not using them at all, they are notorious for causing poor broadband performance. I hope that helps.