Main BT cable trunk failing nothing but DSL available

My house/area only has one type of broadband available, that is ADSL via a single trunk cable from BT. There is no VDSL, no fibre, no wireless, no cable. Nothing that samsknows.com.

Unfortunately that single trunk cable coming out of the exchange I got my broadband from is damaged and appears to be developing high resistance faults on an ever increasing number of copper pair. I have now tried 14 different copper pairs, all of which have failed within minutes or a few weeks, normally after its rained.

The problem is the process with the ISP and BT is incredibly slow. It takes my ISP 3 days of "evaluation" before they even raise an engineer, then he takes a couple of days, he turns up puts me on a new pair and if its good for 5 minutes he leaves. Then the cable fails later that day and another week rolls by without usable internet. The time between disconnects can be measured in minutes even with the router set to use a SNR or 20Db.

With literally zero other options for broadband other than a mobile connection I decided to try my luck with a fail over capable router and a 3G dongle. The dongle unfortunately doesn't seem to carry all traffic (games specifically) and it keeps terminating long standing connections, so that doesn't work. It does for posting this message and some basic web surfing, its more reliable than the ADSL but its still utter garbage.

I really don't know what I do now. I am paying for a phone line and DSL package that I am quite simply not getting the use of and I have absolutely no options open to me at all. How do I get my ISP and BT to fix this cable for good rather than messing about for the next 50 weeks while they go through every copper pair and determine that yes they are all faulty?!

If you are fed on a trunk, there is highly likely to be loading coils on it which is probably causing the problem.

Are you sure they have tried 14 different pairs? I wouldn't be surprised if they have just been swapping you between the same 2 pairs each time as having so many spare pairs available I would think would be unusual.

When you say a single trunk line do you mean that you are connected direct to the exchange rather than to a cabinet? If that is the case then I would be even more surprised if they are that many pairs they can try you on.

If you aren't in a long contract then you may find moving to AAISP would allow for better fault resolution as they tend to be more interested in getting faults fixed and seem to have a bit of a magic touch with BT.

However, if you are on an exchange only line then it may be that BTs only option would be replacing chunks of the cable - and that may not be economical so could result in them refusing you service.