In my youth, I dug trenches as a contractor for a phone company and put 
down a bundle of 4 pvc pipes about 2" in diameter each for fiber optic 
lines.  My guess is that a lot of the phone line traffic is moving over 
fiber without the lossy effects of copper close to the phone company - 
further out, your neighbor may not be so lucky.  But that's just a guess 
- next question is how they transition from fiber to copper, and I don't 
have a clue.  The bigger question to me is how the phone wiring is laid 
out vs. cable.  Once upon a time I suppose you had one pair of wires 
between your house and the pbx, but surely that's not possible now.  
Compare that to the early versions of cable that were essentially a 
single pair coming from the cable company that branched out to every 
house drop.  If that were true now, there would have to be one heck of a 
lot of traffic on that pair of wires at the cable company for them to 
support the same kinds of throughput as DSL for multiple customers - not 
to mention on demand hd movies.  I don't think either situation is 
completely true (single source for cable company or 1:1 sources for 
phone company) - does anyone know more about it?



Carl Denk wrote:
> We are about 2.2 miles from central office in a semi-rural area, and our 
> DSL is high speed (300??), neighbor 1/4 mile farther gets only a lower 
> speed, although he would like higher. :(
>
>
>
>   
>> It is twisted pair, and it's only a short distance from the central 
>> office.
>>     
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