I'm just about at the end of my tether with BT internet. It's not so
much the speed but the way it drops out for a few seconds to minutes
every half hour or so. Of course they deny there's any kind of problem.
It seems to me that this is a problem with the antique copper
infrastructure, so the solution would be to go to fibre.
The street is already cabled, so Virgin seems a good bet. (BT infinity
isn't available, despite being in the city and within sight of the
nearest exchange!)

It's a big-ish house but the current BT Hub gives fair wifi coverage of
the whole place from the first floor landing. It would, however, be a
PITA to run the cable through the external wall directly to there, so I
suspect they wouldn't be keen. It may be that their router would give a
stronger signal, though, and could be used from the ground floor.

I'd rather not have a VM contractor running cable around the inside of
the house as he'd probably make a pig's ear of the place (yes, I know
from Adam's posts that the professional term is a 'cow's ****' but I'm
not electrically qualified), so I'd rather do any significant internal
cabling myself.

The question is, would there be a down-side to taking the cable into an
easy ground floor location, seeing whether it works OK and, if not,
extending myself to the first floor?

I'm assuming (from what I can glean online) that distribution is via
co-ax. I have a drum of RG6 already - Is that OK or should I source
something different if I have to do this? Clearly, this presents some
issues as it's not the most flexible stuff going.

Finally, is there any problem with running this alongside power cables,
as would be the case for networking?

Cheers chaps