I had something similar with my Virgin one and I'm as non tecchy as it gets. I'm doing this from memory as I was talked thru it on the phone by Virgin, so hope it make some sense and helps.

My signal from the router was being masked by all the other wireless networks of my neighbours as all were set to the fastest connection level/frequency and it was interfering so my computer couldn't recognise which was mine and slowing down. They told me to turn it down to the next fastest level (which is still faster than the connection ) and it works great now. As long as you connect it to your network - ie, shing's or whatever you've called it - you should have an option once you've logged into the router for connection speed. Try turning this down one so it's likely to be different to everyone else closeby (virgin said they all default to fastest speed).

Most routers are admin/password and to get in most ip adddresses are a variation on 192.168.0.0

I've read that back and it doesn't make much sense to me but I'm sorry I don't know how to phrase it any better, I'm worse with computers than I am spanners.