Phone line favour, if I may ask?

[Gee-chan]

Hello people.

I was hoping to ask for a favour from anyone in the UK with a BT connection. Do you reckon you would be able to do a quick noise test on your phone-line? To do that just pick it up and hit a number to get rid of the dial tone, then listen. Apparently you should not hear anything but when I do it all it does is 'hiss' at me. I'm just checking if that is normal or if I have a really noisy line.
If that is the case then it will at least partially explain the terrible speeds and reliability I get for my internet.

I also want to check my line length but BT have blocked the service that allowed you to do that and made it official engineer only. Honestly they must dislike people not paying their guys stupid amounts of money to waste time on 2 minute tasks or something...

Anyway, hope you guys can help me.

On another note, what kind of internet speeds do you all get? I'm usually stuck at around 50 Kilobytes but very rarely get a jump to 200.
I'm checking all this because we are on the terrible Tiscali and seeing as they are going belly up we are looking for alternatives....and seeing as no-one else even knows how to look for an ISP, then it falls to me.