Homechoice is apparently owned by Tiscali.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiscali

Use the forum search to look for Tiscali & you'll see just how many customers are having problems at the moment Your slow speed could indicate that your bandwidth is being shaped. See points 1.4 & 1.5 in the AUP
http://www.homechoice.co.uk/legal/usage.html

If your intermittent connection is due to your ISP, there might not be much we can do. You could try changing ports within tools > options > advanced > firewall config. Change the listening port to 80 or 64049 & see if that helps.

What's the brand & model of your modem? It could have it's own internal firewall. If this is the case & it supports UPnP, enable it within the modem & then use the UPnP option on that same LW firewall config page.
Or port forwarding could be an option. If you can find your modem on the list here
http://www.portforward.com/english/r...outerindex.htm
there'll be a guide for port forwarding. Don't forget that LW's listening port, any specific port number allowed thru a software firewall & any port forwarded thru a device must be the same number