I can attest to DSL working on terrible wiring. When the bar was having all those issues, it would still work more or less. All that time the final problem ended up being an undocumented bridge tap in the manhole behind the building. There was around 1000' of unused bridge tap going off somewhere, and while it didn't work right, it did work. What really amazes me, is what the possible throughput is once everything is right. We have bonded VDSL. We pay for 40/10 and get every bit of it. The last time the tech was there, his max theoretical throughput came out to around 48 Mbps PER CIRCUIT. So darned near 100 megs combined. This is on about 1800' of pulp cable from the CO to our BET. Simply amazing.