WI2011 thanks for your input. Interestingly we started receiving calls from Orange recently (!) They've acknowledged the shop staff should never have promised a speed increase without checking local exchange network first to ensure it was indeed possible.
We haven't recorded conversations to date because we found calls a waste of time that just cost us money by hanging on for ages for tech support people that don't know their ass from their elbow. Also it was noticeable that whenever we talked about speed, they were very very cagey and wouldn't admit to any drop. The standard reply (paraphrased) was always, we pump it out at 20mb across the board and can't be responsible for what you receive at your end so it must be your equipment.
After many months, we began online campaigning and writing a series of formal letters as part of a second wave of resistance. It now seems to be slowly getting Orange's attention.
Having said that, the speed situation is actually worse than we originally thought because we recently noticed our speed logs are measured in megabits and what we quoted in correspondence to Orange was megabytes.
The upshot is we're not receiving anywhere near the 8 megabyte IP stream package they dumped on us. Our actual throughput is in reality only averaging 0.89 megbyte/sec which is crap when we were getting a healthy 12-13 megabits (1.5 MB) before they screwed up.
SIGN THE BROADBAND SPEED CON PETITION