Apparently not a joke. An engineer knocked on my door and said "are you having internet problems?!" He explained that he'd had to unplug all our cables from the local hub (not sure where this is, I live next to Barry Road.) He then replugged all cables one at a time to find which one was causing "noise" and therefore pinpointed the issue as coming from my house. He came inside and immediately noticed that the cables were loose so managed to fix it really quickly. He said that the more technological things become the harder it is to manage. I agreed as it seems utterly ridiculous that my faulty cables should create such havoc for the neighbourhood!