The 'nice new ones' are just shitty old Sagem boxes with only wireless g, although they are better than the even shittier old Netgear boxes.
You would be better off buying a decent router and 'obtaining' your Sky settings from the internet.
Not had problems like that, just a general drop in speed over the past few weeks. I was getting 5MB consistently but it's down to around 3MB most of the time now. Not a major problem but causes a few issues when there is XBox stuff going on at the same time I'm trying to watch Sky on my PC and...