It depends. The Fritzboxes that were sold in Australia had an ADSL chipset in them that wasn't very good at handling noisy lines (you're very, very lucky if yours isn't). Your best bet is/was to buy a device with a particular Broadcom chipset in it that was good at handling noise. The difference it made to my connection speed was from syncing at 4 megabit downstream to syncing at 10 megabit downstream. This steadily degraded to 8 megabit over the next few years, but what are you gonna do?
