I live 500 metres from an ADSL 2+ exchange. But that is at the other
side of the town centre, and I could belive my actual wiring run is
longer, also the phone lines in our street (most of the buildings
pre-date Faraday) are not good: noisy and prone to disappearing in wet
weather.

For far too long I have been putting up with 800 kb/s. But, I have two
land lines at the moment and have just got a Plusnet account set up on
the other one, and they forecast 18 to 20 Mb/s. When it first turned on
I was getting 9 Mb/s but the IP Profile was rapidly turned down to 250
kb/s giving me typically 200.

Of course I have Plusnet on the case, the profile is back up to 11.8
Mb/s and interleaving is due to come on any time now. Plusnet seem to be
doing all the right things. I'm not particularly asking about the
technicalities of ADSL, just including detail to provide the overall
picture.

I suspect there is still something fundamentally wrong with the wiring
before the master socket. Although I am getting 11 Mb/s as indicated by
the testers most of the time, I have had at least two periods of half an
hour or more in the past three days where the speed has dropped to
essentially nothing (although the sync light was still showing on the
router). Also, even when the testers are showing a decent download and
upload rate there are times when it takes 10 - 20 seconds to get the
first loading of a normally fast site like Google or the BBC, and often
5 - 10 seconds for each link (again on normally responsive sites like
eBay and Amazon).

For house layout reasons the new router is in the hall at the moment,
and not particularly accessible for testing, but I have an XP netbook
there temporarily with a cable connection to the router, which goes
straight into the master socket with the faceplate removed. And I *do*
have a filter. I'd rather not cable the router into the "main" house
network until I am confident that the new line is useable. If I can't
get at least one of them working I'm tempted to dump both the land lines
and go over to 3G for data (which is normally fast and reliable).

What I would like to do is to check the line status automatically, say
by loading a site every few minutes and logging the result (to simulate
normal internet use). If I could actually run a speed test that would be
nice, but not essential. I havn't done any real coding since the 1980s
(FORTRAN, BASIC, and Pascal) so I am not up to speed with modern tools.

But I don't think it would take me long to write something *if I knew
the best place to start*. Any suggestions (preferably free or open
source, but I don't mind paying reasonable prices if there is something
which will do the job. I'd prefer to run it on the XP box but I do have
an iPad and a (low spec) Android tablet if there are any apps which do
this already.

TIA