At 5 to 6 miles from the exchange your on the extreme limits of current ADSL technology so you're not going to get mega-fast speeds until fibre makes it out into rural areas (if it ever does for all the promises the politicians are making)
However, you should be getting a reasonably reliable, albeit slow, service Frankly, I'd ditch AOL as a first step. No doubt loads of people will shout up saying that AOL are wonderful and they have no problems with 'em but in 15 years in the biz AOL consistently came out top of the pops as far as which ISP was the biggest source of connectivity problems Your problems, from what you describe, could be non-availability of DNS servers or failure of the connection between BT and AOL rather than a fault on your local broadband (details of error messages would help here). You should be able to check out the local connection status on your ADSL router and it would be useful to know whether the ADSL is up or down when you have problems Bru
