Some years ago I was a senior technician with VM, they were just bringing out 20 meg broadband at the time and loads of people were signing up for it, it wasn't actually deliverable in the majority of cases, but we were told not to tell customers this. There are a great many things that affect broadband speed, computer running at optimal performance, quality of cable, distance from exchange etc, even the resistor terminators left off open ports in the cab can affect it, as can cables with kinks in. I had to go out and sort problems when other people couldn't and some of the work was really poor, also with VM they go on about high speed fibre, this is only to the node, from the node to the house is still copper, to get full benefit you need fibre right to the house. The other providers fair no better, they all run on the BT network which in some places is in dire need of an upgrade, the broadband signal travels down the same pair as the phone signal on the BT network, if you have a noisy phone line then naturally your broadband is going to suffer too, being more sensitive it is actually possible to have a phone that works, albeit with noise on the line, but the noise is enough to totally kill the broadband.
Another interesting one which a lot of people are not aware of is routing, My local broadband server is in Liverpool, about 20 miles from me and to be fair it's not normally bad. One day the broadband was terrible, you couldn't use 2 laptops at the same time, I decided to do some tests and the broadband speed had dropped to about 4 meg! I pinged the server and discovered that for some reason I was being routed through a server in Shrewsbury! I don't know whether it was due to maintenance or what but it was definitely going through Shrewsbury.
Another seemingly obvious one is making sure your wireless network is secure, When I was at VM I was sent to a very irate customer in Liverpool. They were paying for the highest broadband speed but complaining it was taking ages to download a film. When I arrived at the address the woman immediately started ranting at me and eventually I was able to get a look at the problem, they had a pc, a laptop and a 10 disc dvd burner, it was obvious what they were doing. Well the pc was switched off but the lights on the router were flashing like crazy, I asked who was using the laptop and she said nobody, it was her son's and he was at school. I pulled the 2 patch leads out of the router, now nothing was connected, yet the light still flashed, obviously someone was using the wireless, I turned off wireless and the lights stopped flashing, problem solved, they'd set up the router but left wireless access open, there was about 3 or 4 neighbours getting free wireless broadband! There was another one similar, it was school holidays and this guy worked from home, between about 10 at night and 10 in the morning it worked fine, outside these hours it was terrible. I arrived at the address and noticed about 6 youths sat on the wall at the side of his house, they all had tablets or phones and appeared to be using them, I went in and sure enough his broadband was really slow. I went back outside and asked one of the lads why they were all sat on that particular wall, "free wifi mate" replied one, sure enough the guy hadn't secured his broadband!
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