It usually wont make a difference if voice is on the same line as your ADSL. I prefer a dedicated copper pair, because it means you dont need to mess about with filters for your telephone handsets.
Running cable between floors is fairly easy, provided you have some sort of 'riser' duct for water/gas pipes and electrical cabling. Otherwise you may have a bit of a difficult time doing it. You could always make the poor dude from the phone company do it !
"It usually wont make a difference if voice is on the same line as your ADSL. I prefer a dedicated copper pair, because it means you dont need to mess about with filters for your telephone handsets."
The filters eliminate the static that DSL creates on the phone line. They aren't very hard to put in, just plug them into the wall outlet and then plug whatever you had pluged in the wall into the filter.
About the DSL and voice being on the same line. I have my DSL and voice on the same line and my speeds are 705/98. This would be typical if I live close to the router, but I barely missed the 3 mile limit of out local DSL line. So my answer would be no, it doesn't make any difference at all.
Basically, they are what's called a low pass filter. They allow frequencies that your phone handset uses (300Hz - 3,400Hz) to pass through, and the rest are rejected.
Just pull out the old CAT 3 line and run a CAT 5 line for your DSL.
CAT 5 is cheap, easy to work with and well worth the overall investment.
With it you won't need low pass filters on your phone line that is shared with the DSL line and you'll have better signal quality for your DSL modem.
I have a 1600/680kbps line in my house, before when it was wired with CAT 3 my dB reading was 43/45. Now with the CAT 5 I get a perfect 45/45 dB signal reading.
According to my ISP the majority of the DSL signal attenuation comes from within the house and not between the distance from house to your ISP's CO.
