Congrats on the house. May it be filled with happiness.
As for the wiring... I used to make a lot of money from that sort of wiring, back when DSL was more popular around here. Nowadays, cable and FIOS are the two major games in town: The phone company won't even install DSL if FIOS is available at the location, and they're trying to force their existing DSL customers to upgrade to FIOS as it's rolled out.
But back in the old days, I used to get calls from people who had signed up for DSL using Verizon's self-install service, but were getting speeds not much better than dialup. Invariably, the problem was their house wiring. Verizon actually did a pretty good job of not selling faster service than they could provide at a location.
Usually, the locations with problems had wiring from the year of the flood, with many extensions spliced off of one ancient wire (not even Cat-3 sometimes) as it meandered through the house. Good enough for POTS, but not DSL. I would get the telco to install a new NID if needed (which was usually the case), then I would install a DSL/POTS splitter a few inches downstream, and install the DSL model inside the home, as close to the splitter as possible. (Most of the NIDs on private homes are installed on the outside of the the houses around here.)
Typically, the wire length between the NID and the DSL/POTS splitter was about six inches, and the wire length between the DSL/POTS splitter and the modem was less than five feet. From the modem it went to a router, and the rest of the interior wiring was Ethernet (and/or wireless, in more recent years).
This setup made it sort of a pain when the customer had to reboot the DSL modem, especially if I mounted the modem in the basement (which was usually the case). But it dramatically increased the DSL speed and quality the rest of the time.
Alas, I haven't done one of these highly-profitable jobs in years. DSL is on its way out around here as FIOS is getting lit up all over the place. Because Verizon desperately wants to get out of the copper POTS/DSL markets, they're trying to force people into FIOS -- even to the point of pulling down the copper connections to the poles once a location upgrades. But many customers are resisting, much to Verizon's annoyance. I was one of them.
I used to have a Verizon DSL connection as a backup (my primary connection was and remains Time-Warner cable). But at 17,600 feet from the DSLAM, the best Verizon could manage on the DSL was 1.4 Mb/s in fair weather, and zilch during a bad storm. I was okay with that, however, because it was cheap and just a backup connection.
But when the FIOS was lit up in my neighborhood, they tried to force me to upgrade to one of their all-in-one packages. Like many existing DSL and POTS customers, I declined the upgrade, mainly because I didn't want or need the TV service. Also, the ONT is big, ugly, and consumes more power than Verizon admits to. I've tested the draw at as high as 40 watts on client accounts, although Verizon says it's closer to 20. Their ugly Actiontec router draws another 60 - 80 watts and doesn't support WPA (at least, not the last time I checked). So we're talking about total power consumption of between 80 - 120 watts, which isn't insignificant at ConEd's exorbitant power rates, plus having to broadcast an obsolete, insecure WEP connection.
So I said, "No thanks" to the upgrade. Verizon responded by downgrading my DSL to 768 based on wire distance, doubling the price, and notifying me that they would soon be discontinuing DSL support in my neighborhood. I responded by canceling the Verizon POTS line altogether and installing VOIP on the cable, with failover to my cell phone if the cable goes down (which has only happened once or twice, and only for a minute or two each time) at a savings of about $180.00/month.
The cable companies have not been standing idly by during all of this. As FIOS rolls out, the cable companies have responded by upgrading service levels on existing cable accounts. In my case, when the fiber was lit up in my neighborhood, my cable Internet service was upgraded to 14 MB/s at no increase in price. One of their techs told me that for a few dollars a month more and a ride to Flushing to pick up a new modem, I can get 30 Mb/s.
So Time-Warner customers have benefited from FIOS: The cable service has dramatically improved since FIOS came to town. I regularly get actual download speeds in the 2 to 3 Mb/s neighborhood, despite running four VOIP lines and as many as six computers on the connection. The reliability has also improved dramatically, with outages being downright rare these days.
The only casualty, it seems, is venerable DSL, which Verizon is dropping like a bad habit. I'll kind of miss it. It's a quirky enough technology to be interesting to learn about and work with, and it generated a lot of business for me once upon a time.
-Rich
I always separated my DSL line from the phone liine to keep it clean. Have cable now, much better than DSL.
