[kwikbreaks]

It's not up to Openreach as they are not public facing and you have no contract with them at all - your contract is with your chosen ISP.

Things can and do go badly wrong with phone lines.

If there is audible noise on voice you can report a voice fault and the phone provider will get Openreach out to check and fix it. They don't always succeed. I had a bad joint that caused problems with the internet but also noise on voice which was causing me earache from my wife. I reported this as a voice fault and had 5 different OR blokes out none of who fixed it. The last one was smart enough to spot that there was only noise with the router connected and told be I had to report it as a broadband fault through the ISP (O2 at the time).

Now those symptoms are spot on for what is known as an HRDIS fault - high resistance disconnect - the ADSL signal gets rectified by the bad joint and you hear this as an audible noise - it's just like the old crystal sets from the early days of radio. Sadly the O2 CR were useless and first increased the target noise margin which drops the speed but doesn't alter the noise on speech. Their next idea was to swap out the router - another pointless thing to do. They then sent the replacement to my old address. I gave up on them at that point and took cable instead.

I knew from the outset what the problem was and that ISPs will try to avoid calling out OR because there can be a penalty charge if the fault is with the customers kit and that always creates bad feeling.

Even after all that hassle I still took a chance on FTTC again. I made sure I didn't cancel cable until it was in though. I was lucky - my new phone line from the cab to my house is fine. The hops from the exchange to the cab may well be as dodgy as hell but I don't care as I now use a VOIP phone for the landline so for me the bit of line upstream of the cabinet never gets used.