Hi guys,
I've recently moved to Wellington from the UK, and, to avoid hassle, decided to go with Xtra broadband, Adventure plan (3.5Mbps, 10GB cap). Since the activation last Thursday, I have been very unhappy with the service.

I had very slow speed all weekend, only managing to download at about 30kb/s. Having finally had enough on Sunday night, I called them up, asked what was going on, to which the guy on the other end reached the conclusion: "Don't know". I was asked to fill out a speed test starting Monday.

I wake up on Monday, and lo... my broadband speed is correct. I hope it is a coincidence, my girlfriend (who has lived here for 8 months), does not.

So it's not going well.

I fire up BitTorrent for the first time yesterday, and it just kills my connection. My ping times rocket to around 2000ms (that's 2 seconds!), so surfing the web is like running through treacle. I tried forwarding the ports on the DSL-502T modem they gave me, and Azureus reports A-OK, but the connection is still atrocious. In fact, it is not until I reduce my upload speed to a princely 5k that I get my ping times back down to 120ms or thereabouts to an NZ server. I can see that I am getting to the exchange OK in a traceroute, it's not until I hit hop 2 with the [blablah].jetstream.xtra.co.nz address where the ping skyrockets.

Very unhappy with spending $60 a month for such a shonky connection, I call Xtra again. This guy was even less helpful.

Him: "Uh, did you do that port forward thing?"
Me: "Yes"
Him: "Then I don't know, there's no reason it should be happening"
Me: "So what do I do now?"
Him: "I don't know. Would you like a case number?"
Me: "Are you saying you can't solve this, and have no idea even where to start?"
Him: "Yes"

So I'm left paying for a pipe I can hardly flll, with a cap I chose because I did expect to be be using a fair chunk of data on BitTorrent. Does anyone know any reason why this is happening? Each time I Google for information, I get forum posts by plenty of happy customers for whom BitTorrent runs fine. I'm also worried that if this is a problem with upload, then if I try to play some games online with Xbox Live, my pings will make gaming unplayable. Upload speed tests (using the speed tester at nzdsl.co.nz) doesn't seem to show an upload throttling, but why this happens with BitTorrent, I don't know.

Please help me if you can!
Thanks
Chris