Thanks for your comments greenglide; you are right, as long as you can hear both ways on the telephone they don't count ADSL as a priority and as I'm within the acceptable limits of ADSL for that line (1.5-4Mb) they won't do anything about it; and VM can't force them to.

I'm only around 1 mile from the exchange; but the main fault is a length of damaged and corroded cable (containing 500 pairs) and they would rather send engineers out day after day trying to fix faults related to it than bite the bullet and replace it.

There were rumours that FTTC was due this year so maybe they are waiting till they do that. In the meantime around 500 homes are suffering with poor ADSL speeds or constantly failing phone lines. Some poor people at the other end of my street have been without a decent service for several months.

Rarely a day goes by when I don't see engineers fiddling about in the cabinets.

Once the cable has been fixed I should see something around 6-10Mb at least. With FTTC and only 300 metres of cable to my home from the cabinet I should get even better speeds.

Mike.