During this afternoon, our line has developed a lot of static which is now at such a stage where it's difficult to hear people on the other end of the phone.

I've plugged a phone straight into the test socket and it's still there, so it would appear to be an outside problem.

Our line rental is through Sky, but it's still BT who physically maintain the line to the exchange...so who do we contact to report the fault? I tried looking on the Sky website, but that wasn't much help.

Thanks.

Speak to Sky. I'd imagine there's a phone number on one of their bills? Its up to them to contact BT. You're Sky's customer, and Sky are BT's customer...

if your telephone cable to your home is overhead type, I would say it was that, it this time of year the copper shielding cracks and causes the noise

if you pay sky for line rental you report faults to them
it may be worth trying a second phone in the test
socket just to make sure its not a faulty phone , but its probably a line fault that sky would pass on to openreach to look at/repair

I asked a neighbour if they were having problems, and they said yes so it would appear to be a problem in this area (or at least from our local pole).

I'm just off the phone (mobile*) to a very helpful guy at Sky who carried out a line test and confirmed there was a fault. BT will have an engineer investigate and hopefully have it repaired by 6pm on Christmas Eve.

Thankfully t'interweb is still working, which implies it's a problem on only the "voice" frequency...which would actually be the second time that's happened in the past 18 months.

*£4.50 that cost me for a 10-minute call!

Thats a new one on me!!

Out of interest, what tends to happen with a fault like this whilst it's being investigated/repaired?

It's just that we're still getting an Internet connection, although it's very unreliable and keeps dropping.

The fault is prob what is known as an HR (high resistance) in one of the wires in your pair of wires somewhere between your house and your local telephone exchange.
It will be caused by a small amount of corrosion, this could be anywhere like in the overhead route or within a cable joint in the ground.
The openreach engineers can normally put their test equipment at the local exchange and "look" towards your premises, this equipment can give a distance to the fault, they can then compare this with cable prints that they have which shows all the cables in your area and this can give a rough location of the fault.
Also local knowledge can play a good part.
The broad band signal can sometimes work over this HR whereas the voice needs a good connection

A quick update on this: by Christmas Eve, Sky hadn't been given notification that the fault had been fixed (and apparently the duty manager or whatever his title was wasn't best pleased).

However, our broadband is still working albeit with a few sync issues. Naturally, there were no engineers working on Christmas Day, but there should be some on today.

Something I have noticed is that when the net is working, it's going faster than it used to and sure enough the noise margin in the stats is lower. I wonder if they've changed a length of cable that was increasing it...

no need to thank me