Hi there.

I'm with Snap, have been for over 2 years.
Been really happy with them for a while, but lately it's become quite bad.
I'm connected to Auckland Mayoral drive exchange and have sync speeds of around 10Mbps
Usually doing a speedtest to Snap (Chch site) would give me pretty much the synch speed.

But lately during evenings that's been really bad.
For example tonight it's down to 2.9Mbps. It has gone down to below 2 in the past.
I and not even mentioning international speeds.

But. I have spoken to a few people at Snap (Tim and Rob) and the answer was: out backhaul upload provider is causing the issue, it's linked to the DSLAM I am on and not much can be done, simply congestion.

So. Tonight when speedtest returned the 2.9 speed (third of the 10 I should have to Chch) I also ran a threaded download of an ISO file from one of my friends on a very fast Orcon link (as in backhaul fiber).
I ran quite happily at 10.
So from what I can gather Snap have lied to me saying (I quote): "I'm sorry, we have plenty of bandwidth here to serve you, we just can't get that bandwidth out to your location. The exchange in your area isn't up to it." 

So it looks like the exchange is up to it, but my connection gets "shaped" in some way which produces these results.
Plus it looks like Snap simply lied to me with the explanation, as it can simply be bypassed with a threaded download. Sadly that completely doesn't work for my iTunes downloads and iPlayer streaming.

D