But The Feltham Line-Man Is Still On The Line

This is one of the rarest sights you will see: a BT / Openreach engineer up a pole and replacing the drop wire into a house. In this case, mine.

It's important to thump the base of the distribution pole a few times with a hammer: this is to make sure it sounds, well, sound, as opposed to rotten. Don't want to strap yourself on and then fall backwards as the pole breaks.

The engineer tested the wire from my house and the magic box found a fault 17.4 metres from the termination box. It has to do with the fact that signals are reflected back from a physical fault in the wire.

The wire they ran into the house is less than a millimetre thick, far thinner than the original cable. This is because, as you will recall from your physics classes, while power is transmitted via current (amps), signals are transmitted by a change in voltage. You need heavy cable for power, but changes in voltage can be transmitted by the flimsiest of wires.

This was but one episode in the long-running saga of my crap internet connection from Talk-Talk, about which I will write more when it is eventually resolved.