Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:52:16 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

When I split the service, should I take the runs to the router and
phone in telephone cable or cat5e?
either.

Aye, CW1308 otherwise known as CAT3. Personally I'd use CAT5 or above for all
cables as laying in cables is the hard bit and the cost difference is
minimal.

will the little bit in the house make any real difference?
Nope

To squeeze the last drop of bandwidth out of ADSL you want minimum
interference from 25kHz up to 1.1MHz (or 2.2MHz for ADSL2+). Running your
ADSL line through the house with all manner of bits of kit chucking out RF
interference isn't going to help.

If I use cat5e, I presume I can take the filtered and unfiltered down
the same cable,
I wouldnt.

Neither would I.

There is a small bit of anecdotal ******** that says that the BELL wire
is unbalanced and carries enough signal to bugger the ADSL when a phone
rings.

That might be but it also acts as a "long wire antenna" for MF broadcast
stations and other RF muck and injects it onto the line. If you plot the SNR
from your router over time you'll see it get bad a night when the foreign MF
broadcast stations start to interfere.
No arf as much as the 5,000 ft of overhead cable to the exchange..

I'd fit an NTE as soon as possible and fit the router next to it then run
ethernet from it to the LAN switch/firewall/server. I'd also play with
different filters. I bought the ADSLNation faceplate to make things "tidy"
but it doesn't work as well as the BT badged MF50 "soap on a rope" filter.