@BlakeRichardson For work I was put up in a flat for 3 months.
I was very kindly supplied a BT line. The connection in the evening/weekends was horrible. I felt like that episode of the simpsons where the shop ower was downloading that "adult" picture line by line. It was so bad I tethered at my own personal expense.
After some extensive digging I found my usage and PC were fine, but the line bandwidth was being chewed harder than a beaver at a damn. The clue for me was in high channel utilisation on a channel I was not using. To my amazement on the BT (and Virgin) routers they have a second OS running that is completely isolated from my network used for "customer sharing". But there is no load balancing and it cannot be restricted.
This is on by default and is what allows you to connect to other BT "hot spots" out and about. And to turn it off you need to submit a request and explain why you want to opt out of it. And you lose your ability to use other hot spots. 24 Hours after this request, my line was one of the most stable connections I had worked with.
I feel sorry for other BT customers in high density/public areas who may not be aware of this.
Thanks,
Peter