[General Maximus]

as above dude you need to make sure that you aren't getting yourself confused with megabytes and megabits. When you run your speed tests you'll get the result in megabits, but when you are downloading a file you'll see the transfer speed in megabytes and in a perfect world you'll be looking at 4 megabytes/sec. I have always liked to use speedtest.net as a good measure for my connection and although I get max speed most of the time, I can pretty much guarantee if i run a speed test in the evening i'll only get 30mbits which is nearly half speed for me. It doesn't bother me though because i don't do any downloading in the evening for that reason; it is sloooooooooooooooow.

You should be aware though that VM do impose a traffic management/throttling policy during peak hours and if you download too much within a given window, your download speed will be reduced to something not worth having. Regardless of traffic volume, they also throttle p2p protocols such as newsgroups and torrents which might explain your sucky speed on that "premium link".

It all sounds a bit poo but VM aren't all that bad. Some areas are over congested so you won't get the sort of speed you expect, but as a whole i think most peeps are happy speed wise. To get a true picture you need to do speed tests at different times throughout the day to get a more accurate picture of what sort of speed you can actually achieve with your connection. If you only do it during the evenings and weekends then things ain't gonna look good.