There are few experiences more frustrating than signing up to an ultra-fast broadband package only to find that, instead of flying through the network like Achilles on amphetamine, your Megabits are sauntering to your PC like snails on sleeping pills. Sadly, until the government’s ‘Digital Britain’ project concludes sometime in 2012, the communications infrastructure just isn’t up to the advertised speeds of the service providers in many parts of the country.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to put up with tooth-grindingly slow speeds, however; there are some measures you can take to give that Megabit rate a little nudge. You may not reach the maximum speeds advertised by providers like BT Total Broadband, Sky broadband, Tiscali broadband, and O2 broadband, but you may be able to move from a painful limp to something more like a steady jog. If you can afford the slightly eye watering monthly fee of £50, you might try switching to Virgin Media, the only internet service provider currently offering speeds of 50 megabits per second via it’s super-fast fibre optic network.

But some useful ‘in-home’ measures include keeping your modem and router clear of other electrical appliances (they can interfere with efficiency), always using the latest versions of web browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox, ensuring you’ve put micro-filters on your phone and internet socket to reduce interference, and turning your router off if you’re just using the PC and no other devices in the house are accessing the internet (routers can slow down the connection). The speed increase will be more like moving from a 30 mph road to a 50mph road than a test drive with Jenson Button. But you won’t have to grind your teeth quite so hard.