BT home hub 3 slow, other router?

[Sanna]

Hi, we recently got the new home hub in our house, switching from hub 1.0 to 3.0 (after many calls to BT). Our old hub was slow and kept restarting every 30 mins or so but i could play BF3 with it. However, i would get disconnected from the game a lot. So we got the new hub, it doesn't disconnect but our speed is much slower and it seems to be changing a lot, one second i get a great ping the next it's very high etc so the game lags a lot. I think what i actually want to know is if anyone can recommend a better router for internet through the phoneline, to my comp i have cable and the rest of the people in the house wireless. Also with home hub 3 we could no longer stream any media but downloads seemed to work better. Doesn't make any sense.

I really hate BT and my housemate renewed the contract without me knowing and i'm happy if i never have to speak to BT again so a new router of different brand would be the best thing. I tried with a Netgear DG834G (which i found in the livingroom) but i can't get it working, it says i am connected but if i try to use the internet it doesn't work. Any ideas from anyone about any of this??

(Oh and to make sure i don't get the usual responses:
Routers restarted, main socket checked, filters replaced, other electronicts turned off before. etc.)

Happy for any help!