Last night, I spent a couple of hours crawling around under a desk and through the eaves, tracking down and repairing a loose connection in a phone socket that was causing intermittent static on the phones and connection problems for the computers. The phone sockets and wiring had recently been replaced, but it seems the people who did it didn't do a very good job of it. I eventually soldered the wires into place, so that the connection would be as good as possible and because I didn't trust the little V-shaped metal clamps in the socket, which is where the problem had arisen. It's added about 5cm to the distance the wires travel without their twisted-pair arrangement, but I don't know if that'll matter at all. The static is gone for the moment, and I'm hoping that my torrent speeds and page loads will become more consistent now, but it's too early to draw any conclusions.