Miracles do happen.

[Capitol]

After 18 months of nightmare phone trouble, Open Reach finally dug up the pavement and remade the 70 year old joint for my line. Turns out that digging up the pavement for other services at least 8 times in the past few years had corrupted the cables and my line was shorting to other phone lines. I now have a phone line which appears to work, but the worrying comment was made, that we don't know if we have cut off other people! I'll now wait a month, before I believe that the problem is solved, I just don't have faith!

[Brian Gaff]

I had this with Virgin a few years ago. The cables apparently had been compromised due to tree roots having cracked the green tubing the cables ran in, and the guy told me I was lucky to be just across the road from the green box., looking at the tests on other pairs in the cluster as yet unused, half of them had shorts already! Brian