Many years ago when we first got cable (in those days it was NTL) we had an issue with pixelated picture and frozen picture. In the end we had three engineers around our house one was watching our TV, the senior engineer was sat in a van across the road by the green street box tapped in to our cable feed and watching and trying to resolve the issue and the other was running between the two. They resolved it in the end but I am not sure what they did, I think it was an issue in the green street cabinet.
Our contract reaches expiry date early next year and dropping the phone line is one of our options as we don't use it now a days, the only person to regularly phone us is the daughter but she has mobile, facebook and skype as options. We already have 50mbps broadband and honestly can't see the need for us to have 100mbps broadband so that will be an interesting conversation.