I've just (this afternoon) finished getting one part of our big renovation project done — undergrounding all our cabling. Power was done a few weeks ago, but getting Chorus to come and do the phone line was a longer process. Snap were very helpful in getting it sorted for us though. We did it primarily for aesthetic reasons but I thought it might be interesting for people to know what a difference it's made to line speeds for us.

We actually had a slightly bizarre experience earlier in the reno. The builders clipped the overhead phone cable, completely severing one of the two wires. We didn't realise this had happened though because the modem still managed to sync - although on the rare occasions when I had to reboot it, I did notice that it could take 5 or even 10 minutes to achieve sync, and the speed had become dreadful, dropping to about 7m downstream with lots of variability and timeouts. We just didn't realise that any cable damage had happened. Eventually I got the electrician to have a look, he found the break in the cable and rejoined it, and the line synced up instantly giving us about 24 down/6 up. (Neither he nor I understand why it worked with one cable broken. Any ideas?) BTW most of the internal phone cabling in the house had been upgraded a while back, including having a master filter put in, but there was still a short section from the overhead demarc point to the new cable within the roof space.

Anyway, that was nice, but I was pleasantly surprised by the further boost this afternoon. The electrician had already run a new cat5 cable from my patch panel to the demarc point from the underground cable, and when the very helpful and friendly Chorus tech got his new cable from the pole hooked up to that the line immediately synced, and now on SpeedTest I get 43 down/8 up.

Obviously it's not just undergrounding, as all the presumably rubbish old phone cabling in the house got bypassed, and I can't imagine it would be worth putting cable underground on the off-chance it improves speeds, but I thought the experience might be interesting to others.

(Oh, and we're not even on the schedule for fibre, hence why I don't mind spending a bit in the mean time to return to civilised world speeds. I still feel very sad when I think of my 100m symmetrical service back in England, for very little money.)