My retired father in law lives on the outskirts of the city, and does not qualify for subsidised fibre install. Even though there is a fibre right on his doorstep for a rural shool next door. We got a quote from Chorus for a non standard install about 5 years ago and it took them 10 months to quote $10K. Ever since he has been limping along trying to watch Netflix and the like on VDSL. Recently the copper/or something network side degraded or failed and we had weeks of intermittent outages. It was finally fixed (network side), but they refused to look at the BT ports in his house, which were also failing (the one out of 4 that was working was literally hanging off the wall). They said we would have to pay a private contractor.

Well... that's going to have to be me. I've done a bit of Ethernet crimping and short runs at my place before. And I noticed the old copper is just a red and white wire. I moved his VDSL modem and useless BT port (for better WiFi coverage mainly). But I re-punched them into the old outlet, which just dangles behind the router.

I ordered a RJ45 jack to get rid of the BT port, and I plan to install that properly as soon as it arrives.

Is there anything else I can do to improve things? He got rid of his land-line so it's just for internet. Cable between the ETP and the jack point is probaly on its last legs anyway... is it true you can rewire cat5 in its place and use a single pair in place of the old white phone line/(red and white) copper?

Any other tips?