You had a cut wire, clear cut case.....

mine is just poor, worse when it is wet, when i ring the reseller they warn that I will be charged £120 if openreach can't find a problem, we know what that means, they will come out 4 weeks after the rain, find that you can get data down it and claim it's fine.
Yes virgin is a shit show, I hate them, and after 8 years I gave up and went back to them because as I said they are now the ones that hold the monopoly to supplying my house as they are the only ones to actually have a connection to it. They are a nightmare to deal with but they say i will get up to 100Mb/s and i get exactly that all the time without fail unlike the overburdened and outdated phone line.
Had a video call with a friend in Chile, over 4000 miles away, it was like they were just down the road, no lags, perfect natural response time. i have a video call with my dad 4 miles away and it's like he is on the moon with 1-2s lag, we have to use the phone for audio and the lag in the video is significant. Welcome to the British telephone network monopoly where broken lies are only fixed when they are literally cut off.
You can't run a reliable cashless society on our outdate and crumbling infrastructure.