Thanks to all the readers who commented both with suggestions and with their own experiences – good and bad. After much consideration and a good look through the deals offered in my area, I opted for Be’s Unlimited package. It’s not cheap at £17.88 per month, but I was won over by the promise of a support team that actually knows about broadband and the lure of a static IP address, no download cap and 1.3Mb/s uploads.

It activated right on cue, and I even got to try out the support first hand. I have to confess to attempting the setup process with my own 802.11n router at 12:45am on a Thursday (don’t ask), and had a few issues with the settings for my static IP. Despite the ungodly time and my suspiciously slurred speech, a knowledgeable Dutch chap was all too happy to walk me through the process and we had it up and running within minutes. He was even chatty and cheerful, which is not something I’m familiar with when it comes to ISP staff.

Several readers suggested looking at SamKnows and ThinkBroadband, so before I made my choice I had a rough idea I’d be getting around 5Mb/s speeds at 800m from my local exchange. I ran some checks over the weekend and my actual peak-time speed seems fairly stable at between 5Mb/s and 5.8Mb/s. It’s not exactly Virgin cable broadband speeds but it’s plenty for my needs, and it’s good to see the estimates proved on the money.

So it’s first blood to Be, and a positive experience for me with ADSL so far. The next hurdle will come when BT’s Infinity fibre lines make their way to my area – pencilled in for late this year - ready for ISPs to take advantage. Has this reached your area yet? If so, has it met expectations? Let me know in the comments below.

This is bad. Very bad.

I’ve been with Virgin broadband in various properties for nearly four years now, and I’m genuinely despondent at the thought of switching to ADSL. Some of you will probably bring up traffic shaping, customer service and other less appealing aspects of Virgin’s offering, but I’m not listening. The blinkers have gone up and my opinion is set in stone: cable broadband just works, and I can’t live with anything less.

I know it’s an irrational stance, but it’s borne out of my experiences. In those four years it’s only failed once, and that was fixed within a couple of hours. At all other times it has reliably given me speeds close to what I’m paying for, with little slowdown at peak times and no need to worry about distances from exchanges or ageing copper wiring.

That always-there reliability, to me, is worth more than anything else a broadband provider can offer, and it’s something I’ve convinced myself – more so after listening to Barry bang on about it in what seems like every podcast – that ADSL services in this country can’t match.

Now, I know there are millions of people in the UK using ADSL, in all likelihood having experiences every bit as good as mine with cable, but all I can think about is my new flat being tarnished by this country’s inadequate infrastructure and I’m helpless to stop it.

So please, come forth and reassure me! Am I being overly pessimistic about ADSL? Do you get a reliable, always-there connection at good speeds, and if so which company provides it? I’ll be taking the plunge far too soon for my liking, so let me know your experiences in the comments below.

Lots of hmm and humpf and hmmmm resulted. At the end of the day, the fault appears to be diagnosed as being between the exchange and the green box in the village. BT’s response was to offer me a choice – accept this new slower-than-a-modem speed as being “acceptable” or have the lines cut off. You can imagine my response. One engineer suggested trying a 3G modem stick instead – I was quite calm at pointing out that there is no 3G signal, only slow EDGE.

Fortunately, having the private mobile number of the owner of my ISP on my speed-dial enabled BT to reconsider the matter, and a “fresh”  pair of wires were found in the bundling from the exchange to the green box.

This helped a lot, and now I have one line running at 1.5Mb/sec and the other at around 1Mb/sec. This results, through the magic of end-to-end Cisco load balancing, to equate to about 200KBytes/second real data throughput. Which is where I was some months ago, before water got into the lines (or a rat ate through the multicore).

This week, I am sat under a palm tree in the West Indies on a small island which is only a few miles across, has a smaller population than my next big village at home, and where everything goes slooooooooow.

The inhabitants are so laid back, they are horizontal – and “in the next five minutes” means “sometime this afternoon, but lets not rush things – have a cocktail in the meantime”. The crystal clear sea is trickling around my toes, and I have a Wi-Fi connection back to the beach house we have rented for a week.

And yes, I have faster and more reliable broadband connection to my servers in the UK than I get from the house on the Essex/Suffolk borders.

If this doesn’t strike our MPs as being somewhat odd, given that we are supposed to be in a Digital Britain where service provision is the only thing left (given the recent implosion of the financial services bubble), then there is no hope for us as a country.

I might just stay here – time for a swim, methinks

Fortunately, I’m with an ISP that doesn’t seem to mind how much data I pull through the network each month. That’s within reason of course.

But at the end of the day, he knows I am limited by having two ADSL lines and that I am a fair distance from the exchange. Think 1Mb per line and you’d be about right.

So you will doubtless be as amused as I was to see this usage log from my trusty TZ190 Sonicwall firewall. Apparently my main desktop computer had managed to download 16,777,215 Terabytes of data. And it seemingly did that in just 5 days 9 hours.

Yah boo sucks to the Acceptable Usage Policy – I think I have a backup of the entire internet now.

Used to the fluctuating performance of ADSL, my new service runs like a dream. It doesn’t drop out, it doesn’t slow down when someone next door phones a call centre in India, and – best of all – it runs as fast as it should.

I ordered the “Up to 4Mb” service and last night ran a speed checker: my download rate is a little over 3.8Mb/s. Considering that’s faster than I ever got at my last address from my “Up to 16Mb” Sky service, I’m absolutely ecstatic with the results.

Others out there may have had wonderful experiences with ADSL, others may achieve speeds close to those they were promised when they signed up. I personally haven’t ever got what I paid for from broadband, until now. In this house at least, ADSL is history.