niconiconiADSL works over wet string? Now, what about "ADSL over a UNPLUGGED phone line"? During a building-wide copper to fiber upgrade, the phone company stupidly unplugged my phone line from the distribution box. the phone was completely dead, no voltage. But my ADSL modem could complete the handshake. Speed degraded to ~128 Kbps, but I could still read basic webpages or chat on IRC... Apparently the parasitic capacitance on the line was enough for the AC signal to jump across the gap. My best guess was that only the ground wire was lost, and the parasitic capacitance of the modem's isolation transformer could complete the circuit via the mains powerline.
Steve@niconiconi I’m aware of a case where there was a 2cm gap on just 1 wire of the pair and it wasn’t detected for years because they never used the phone and back in those days adsl1 was capped at 1.5mbps here. It was only discovered when they upgraded to adsl2 and didn’t see an improvement in sync speed
Saphira Lohikäärmekettunen 
@lilstevie @niconiconi had this happen some months ago, one of the two wires disconnected - technician was really confused as all measurements said it shouldn't work but it still synced ~5 Mbps (from the 100 we have)
Jes Moved to @@Jessica @niconiconi @lilstevie VDSL2 with vectoring, we actually needed supervectoring (up to 250mbps) to get that speed not too long ago, but they did some wiring improvements apparently and downgraded us to vectoring - which is fine, we only pay that speed anyway