Hi folks

I lived in a house in One Tree Hill, Auckland from January - July 2014. While there I had VDSL with Snap, and they installed a master filter when the connection was done. Looking at my speedtest.net results from then I was able to get 18-35 Mb/s down and ~9 Mb/s up over the time I was living there.

We moved out in July and lived somewhere else for 12 months, and have just returned to the house (rental). This time around I thought I'd see what other ISP's were offering and thought I'd try BigPipe. We just got connected on Friday and the first thing I did was a speedtest, and was surprised to see 6.5/6.5 on the connection. Looking at the modem stats showed that was around what the sync rate was too.

I have a few questions:

* Am I going to be able to get better speeds with another ISP, or are they all the same?
* If they're not the same, what specific differences do they have that affect the speed?
* Are there other neighbourhood factors that could have affected the speeds over the last 12 months to make the connection slower?
* Do I have any other options for diagnosing the speed issues/improving the speed?