Any way to speed up connection between Aus and UK?

Here's some tips from the support.xbox.com website for "Improving XBox Live speed," see if they help you at all:

support.xbox.com/.../performance.aspx

Thanks for the link mate, all pretty standard stuff there though that I've already tried, I was after something a little less obvious like messing with the console settings etc?

To be honest, I can't see there being a way round it as such, must just be the distance thing, having said that I have no problems connecting with americans, as much as I don't want to ;)  

Distance is always going to cause problems when it comes to connecting with us in the home counties from Australia. With the States and Asia you're quite a bit closer to them compared to us.

No problem, the link is the best I can do as the extent of my networking expertise is such that I generally just fire up my devices and hope  they still connect to the internet, all right, it's not really that bad, but it's not much better either.

I think you're correct, it's just the Aussies fault for living so far away from everyone else, and the Americans aren't so bad once you get to know them, they're like everyone else.  No matter where you live, there's always going to be undesirables, just have to try to remember not to paint them all with the same brush.

There is very little you can do about this, the problem isn't speed it's latency.  Latency  is the delay of data between you and you and the other person.  This can be measured as a Ping.  A ping is the time it takes in milliseconds for your data to be sent back to you.  When I tested my ping from Birmingham in the UK to Sydney Australia, the ping was 316ms, a good ping for online gaming is anything below 100ms.  I'm afraid there is no way to fix this.

Bummer, thanks for your help, hopefully they'll find a way in the near future