[techdragon]

I’ll go one better, ADSL doesn’t even need two continuous wires to work, one is good enough as long as the other is just barely electrically coupled. I had a 12 month epic journey to get a performance fault fixed on my line. In the end it took 6 technician visits, three senior technicians and finally one smart experienced technician to check the “not in the textbook” faults for a performance degradation and he discovered that my line had was actually mis-wired! I had one wire connected to the exchange and another was a barely connected lose joint (actually disconnected but still technically in the plastic joint housing) about half way to the exchange. I was still getting a few megabits with intermittent drop outs for months on what amounted to a single wire!