Re: Talking about cables
I know someone who carefully specified 'line termination should be within 2m of the router' because the Cisco routers came with a 6ft(1.8m?) cable for free.
He learned his lesson (order 5m cables, just in case!) after discovering that at more than one site the line termination had been mounted half way up the wall opposite the comms cabinet because the line guy had thought "I'm about 6ft fingertip-to-fingertip, and it can touch both the line termination and the router!"
It was obviously quicker to pick up a few 5m cables from PC World than argue with BT/Virgin/whoever(*) to get them to re-site the termination somewhere sensible
(* Virgin were taken off the list of 'approved suppliers' because... well, life's too short!)