[sarg]

There will be a cabinet, and 99.99% of these are now FTTC. Surely you'd never see copper from a residential house direct to the exchange.

Mike did say 1/2 mile copper up a country lane, which if it going to a FTC cabinet should see 35-40mbps download speeds.

The big point is it'll cost £19.99 to get the line installed by BT/OR (others may charge more), then you have 14 days to cool off from any contract if the speed is not any good, it's a no brainer for me to spend £20 to find out if a landline will work, when a landline will always be preferable to mobile with current tech.

One of the benefits living rurally is there is generally less traffic on the bandwidth to/from the local cabinet. I also have almost zero wi-fi band clashes as have no nearby neighbours

I just found the last speedtest result of the 5G router I had before it went back:

9.75mbps download
0.75mbps upload !!!
46ms ping
17ms jitter

A week before was:
14.6mbps download
20.9mbps upload !!!
28ms ping
8.5ms jitter

Very inconsistent as you can see.

Also gave constant DNS connection problems, even for regularly visited websites (BBC News for example). Netflix would run okay (because Netflix are clever), once I could get the smart TV to actually see the SSID, but streaming Sky or iPlayer was useless/unwatchable