BT Bumps DSL Customers to 20Mbit

@Chocoa: You can only set your noise margin for a couple of routers. Higher noise margin should result in a drop in speed though as it trades off speed for stability.

@Peter: Nothing to do with the UK's infrastructure, it's insufficient capacity in your area. Assuming you've tried a decent ISP like Zen and you're not baseing your results on several ISPs that throttle (and there are quite a few that do)

@Gordon: Given the tone of the article I assume both your house and the TR office has had 24Mbps services for some time. While most cities now have WBC or a decent ADSL2+ LLU provider large swathes of the country still only have standard ADSLMax. Samknows won't give me the total combined Be/Sky/Bulldog/WBC exchange numbers but it'd bet it's less than half the total number of exchanges.

@Xiphias Yes the range of routers that you can adjust in this way is small. But for those that can, its very useful!
Key word in your statement is "should" - your theory is correct. However, in actual practise, in my experience though, you can get a massive increase in speed. The Netgear modem/routers seem pretty robust and error tolerant - at getting the data with minimal impact on stability. Many comments on-line support this view I believe. As said, I can run at 8 Mbps flat out for 3-4 weeks without a hiccup or any apparent data issues. For those who WANT to try this tweak ( on appropriate routers as you rightly point out)I can whole-heartedly recommend it... I proved it works!

I suspect throttling is applied to a lot more than just video streaming. I recently switched from Orange to BT Option 3, hoping for a less awful service. In one sense they have provided that, in that I now seem to get 4mbs rather than 2 (although 8 is presumably impossible). But just like with Orange, my connection quality drop massively from around 5:30pm until after 11... to give an example, download speeds go from over 500kbps to around 50!. I am well aware that you get what you pay for, but I am paying the extra for BT's "best" option and I didn't see anything in the terms and conditions about getting only 10% of potential download speed all evening, every day... Not particularly happy so far.