I live 500 metres as the crow flies from the exchange, back home in Lowestoft. (I live about that from the nearest one in Nottingham! I pick good uni residences, don't I?
) We're on a 2Mbit (actually 2272 Kbps) service with Orange in Lowestoft, and we get just that. No throttling, no bad pings, no download limits (AFAIK, but it's not used 24/7) even though there's a FUP. Upload is 288Kbps. If I had another phone line and an 8 or 16Mb broadband service, I've almost no doubt that I'd be getting what I paid for. It's just picking the right supplier!
Oversubscription is something the regulator Ofcom needs to look at. It needs to be stopped, and better investment in the infrastructure to give you the service provided. Ideally, if they state in legislation that the ISP has to give to you the contention ratio you'd be connected to, and the maximum contention ratio the UBR can support with everybody on the maximum tier, then that'd make many of us very happy, I think, to know just what we're getting.