Internet slowdown

[Emu76]

I'm with Virgin National on the up to 8Mbps package, and I normally get around 3Mbps, which is perfectly acceptable, and the max my phone line can take. On Thursday it took a turn for the worst and began running at 0.3Mbps, which as you probably realise, is nothing short of terrible. I contacted Virgin and apparently this was probably caused by a power surge I had last week, and the connection was supposed to return to normal in the next 3 days. I'm getting close to that time now, and there has been no change, in fact the connection is almost always stable at 0.3Mbps, which makes me think they may have imposed a sneak cap on me.

I have never heard of this problem before, so does it exist or are Virgin trying to screw me over?

My speedtest result:

[Emu76]

So I'll judge from this that Virgin are having me on and actually trying to stop me hogging their bandwidth unfairly?

[Jasp]

Pure garbage, see the thread about 5 down about VM, they throttle all the time.

[mehmeh]

AFIAK Virgin don't STM their BT line service(s). Could be an issue at their end, the exchange or your end. Best thing if your not happy is to give them another ring. Theres no reason why you should go from 3Mb to .3Mb without explanation from VM.

Is the speed constant regardless of the time of day? Assume you've reset the modem/router and such like already?

[Emu76]

Yep, 24hrs a day it's 0.3Mbps. Their capping policy would put me down to 0.08Mbps during peak hours, but that isn't the case so I don't know what's wrong.
I spoke to a Virgin guy again, started by accusing them of foul play but he just said he would send me a slow speeds email (reset your router, check your cable connections ) after which I can raise a fault and BT will come fix my line, which I'm starting to think is probably borked. It just seems weird that I can get 0.4Mbps upload, yet download is almost constant 0.3Mbps, just like a cap.
Anyway I'm getting tired of this speed and I've had problems with Virgin before, incidentally this time last year my pings were always stupidly high. If I have any more problems I'll probably be after my MAC.

[handscombmp]

Have you looked on Sam Knows for what other services you can get on your exchange.

If you can get O2/Be or Sky i'd move to them (in that order)