I have been with NTL for some time now and they seem to be OK

Something to realise (if you don't already - I didn't!) that these companies advertising broadband speeds are a little sly... there's a difference between "B" and "b"!

The adverts talk about megabits, whereas in reality we refer to file sizes in megabytes. The difference is there are 8 bits in a byte, so 1Mb/s = 125kB/s. So to be reading 270kB/s from a 2Mb connection is pretty good.