Before the days of wifi came the days of cable splitters. My house had coaxial cable running everywhere. I pay for premium internet service to support my work-at-home needs (and my HD streaming habit), and it’s frustrating to have crummy signal. Luckily, I have a dog-walking neighbor who works for Comcast. He told me to suggest egress (signal leakage) and noise as possible reasons for my signal degradation.

As it turns out, the line from the telephone pole had probably been chewed by squirrels, and had water inside the casing. Once inside, the line fed to a splitter, then to another splitter, then stretched to an amplifier in the workshop area, then doubled back on itself before reaching - you guessed it - a third splitter.

Wound up with all that was a nest of telephone wire. Like, for someone (not me) who maintains a land line. Instead of feeding to a neatly-installed junction box in the wall, these wires were fed through holes drilled in the floor… this made it especially easy to rip them out.