Look what we have to put up with in Perth. This is my residential line (Nildram, but shows as Tiscali now):

This is the business line:

This is on a good day. Neither results them are particularly inspiring and BT refuse to do anything about fixing the residential line to match the business line, other than having replaced the master socket when a fault manifested itself last year. Both copper circuits follow the same path back to the exchange (or so a BT engineer assured me) so I'm guessing the residential line has some pretty crappy jointing along the way. To make matters worse, changes in humidity, temperature and the phases of the moon can reduce the speed by as much as 30%. There's even some folk in the estate who've been turned down by BT Broadband, yet the adjacent business estate which houses HBoS, The Scottish Executive and Scottish and Southern Energy had new fibre especially pulled up to this end of town for them.

There's also Virgin Cable duct roughly a 100 yards round the corner from the estate but sadly they never made it down our street when the houses were built. So much for de-regulation, competition and choice.