I'm a newby to this forum. For the past 6 month I've been living in a guesthouse apartment in small village on the lovely Mosel river, Germany. There I had the availability of a shared wireless FON_AP connected to ADSL, from the building next door, with good performance. Yesterday I moved to a new apartment about 3Km's down the road in an even smaller village. The apartment has a DSL connection but now I have performance problems.  I connected a FON la Fonera WiFi box and have excellent connection with my laptop.
When I tested with the testmy.net I got the following sad result

 Your connection is: 205 Kbps or 0.2 Mbps
You downloaded at: 25 kB/s
You are running: 4 times faster than 56K and can download 1 megabyte in 40.96 second(s)
Member Ident:Username:boats CompID:19920472949000
Test Time:: 2008/05/01 - 6:33am
Test Browser and OS info: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; RV:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080313 SeaMonkey/1.1.9
Test ID: LFTRICD1G (if this is a screenshot go to testmy.net to see if this is fake)
Diagnosis ^info^: May need help : running at only 8.82 % of your hosts average (t-dialin.net)
This was tested from a 507 kB file and took 20.22 seconds to complete

The landlord kindly had the DSL extended to my apartment. Before I bother him with this performance problem, I'd like to see if this a common problem with this provider (T-DAILIN.DE), the network, the distance of this small town from an exchange or other problem I had not thought of.
Anyone have any ideas ? Thanks in advance Boats

Thank you Mudmanc4 for welcoming me to this site
I'll follow your advice and also look around this Forum site. I do have connection, albeit soo slooow. I'm working on temporary assignment here with the understanding that I can work from home, otherwise it's a 140KM commute to the office Hope it will not come to that

Thanks Tommie Gorman,
As I don't own the DSL myself, and my landlord is away, I don't have the details of the account and the advertised speeds promised. All I know is that I'm connected via t-dialin.net from the test I did via the testmy.net application. I tested via Dusseldorf, the closest one listed where I got these results.
I am a FON member and installed a new La Fonera wireless device on the DSL. I'm not sure if you are familiar with the Fon (ap) community at www.fon.com (´´it's all about sharing your access point´´) and I now suspect that I might have to configure or refine the device settings.
I'm going to try this first and see if that is where the bottleneck is. I will report back  with the results, should that be the case. In the meantime, thanks again for your ( and everyones) input 
Regards from the Mosel,
Boats

By the way, this is a great forum.

Thanks everyone, .... but ... the mystery is solved.
I now know what the problem is  , there simply is no more than 385 kB. broadband available in this village according to T-online! While, in the village where I moved from (only 3 Km.) away, there was 3000 kB. available. I am a little . and somewhat disappointed, but [se-lä-vie?], smaller village, slower pace? I guess I'll have to life with it and have a slower pace myself. I did do a few more 'testmy.net' tests and it seems like I'm getting the 385 kB. T-dialin.net promised. It is very noticeably slow! Under the circumstances I guess I'll have to get used to, and live with it for the time.... Thanks to all on this forum for the help you tried to give on this wonderful forum.

In the meantime, I just got a call from my wife (from Boston, Ma.) on Skype and the performance and delay was very noticeable, besides getting cut off in the middle of the conversation . I also tried calling her back on VoIPBuster and the delays were even worse and eventually got cut off again after several minutes!

If anyone has any tips, tricks  to optimize my VoIP calls on this type of (narrow) bandwidth, I'd really appreciate it, or do I need to start a new thread: ``how to optimize your VoIP calls on narrowband´´?

Thanks again for any input and kind regards,
Boats

Thanks, I will (later), night now (time difference?)