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If you haven't noticed Steeple Aston's BT exchange has very recently been upgraded to 21CN, giving ADSL2+ speeds. I had to give Plus.net a nudge to change my account, but after 2 weeks, from 6Mbps to 18Mbps.

you can plot the villages speeds here:
http://www.uswitch.com/broadband/speedtest/streetstats/#home_ox254ru_download_0_all_all_6_1

 all we need now is a 21st century mobile network 

Thanks for the tip-off, Royce. I'm also a PlusNet customer. Once I gave them a nudge by asking the question onlne, they switched me over within a day and I'm now getting download speeds of around 15.3 Mbps, compared with 6 Mbps (on a good day) before. My router (Netgear DG834G v3) is six years old and there was said to be some doubt about whether it would cope with faster ADSL2 broadband, but so far no problem.
As you say, roll on the day we get a decent mobile phone signal!

It appears that the broadband upgrade may have made my broadband connection unstable and prone to frequent disconnections.  Speed is not a problem (for me up to 14Mbps)  Having asked around a few people in the village they have been having similar connection problems for the last couple of weeks.

I contacted my ISP (Plus.net) who have been looking into it and the problem seems to have been resolved by turning on interleaving.  If anyone else is having problems like this I'd expect an email or call to their ISP to get interleaving turned on should help.

I'm also with Plusnet and have been talking to them about the same problem. Interleaving did nothing to imrpove things at first (I was disconnected more than 50 times yesterday in a single day) but all of a sudden things seem to have stablilised today.
However, download speed has reduced. It went up to 14 Mbps after the village upgrade, but is back to down to about 8 or 9 with interleaving.

I put interleaving on when I changed routers last year so don't know, but I had a couple of drop-outs after the village upgrade, going from 18.6 down to 14Mbps, now worked its way back up in steps to 18Mbps and stable - touch wood. Plus.net are usually quite helpful in sorting problems.

After another chat with the very helpful Plusnet people, it seems my old Netgear router (five or six years old, I think) couldn't cope with the faster ADSL-2 speeds.
The connection did stabilise when they capped my download speed at 8 or 9 Mbps,
but they've now supplied me with a new router (free of charge, except for postage, unless I leave Plusnet within the next year or two when I'd have to pay them £40 for it).
The connection to the new router is now stable and if it stays that way they say they'll remove the cap and get me back up to 14+ Mbps within a few days.
The lesson seems to be that if you're having problems with your broadband connection repeatedly dropping out in Steeple Aston, you should first talk to your ISP (obviously)
and if you have an old router you might need to consider replacing it if you want access to the new higher speeds.

As a "silver surfer" and not really IT skilled I thought I would ask my providor, BT, to speed me up from a steady 3 Mbps to something better.  After various calls to distant shores lasting up to 45 minutes I finally spoke to someone who listened to my plea.  I was sent a new router as my old one was better situated in the museum but the new one was faulty.  A few days later I recieved a replacement which worked but the speed stayed the same.  Eventually a BT engineer came to call.  It appears that I needed a new filter to my Sky box and he needed to "switch me on" to enable the improved speed which I am now experiencing.  Not 18 Mbps but much faster than before.  The moral of this story is that if you are with BT you will need to be very patient and also persistant as they suggested the lines in the village on North Side are old and we are a long way away from the exchange!  It is possibel that they thought the exchange was in India but you can make up your own minds about that.

Richard,
With my new Plusnet router - and after a further conversation with Plusnet's technical team - I'm now getting 15.5 Mbps. I'm on the corner of Northside and Paines Hill, about the same distance from the exchange as you are, so don't let them give you that nonsense about the lines being old and you being too far from the exchange!
However, for those villagers with old routers, it does begin to look as if many may need a new router to take advantage of the higher speeds.

For those on the exchange and rather further out (in the Bartons, for example), achieving any kind of braggable broadband speed is currently no more than a pipe dream. However by selecting a better router (a Billion 7800) I've managed to increase speeds by nearly 3 times. Which sadly means I'm at about 3Mb...

Any sign of when Infinity will be available to the village?