Re: i guess...
"Everyone had no internet for about 8 months until the local utility company finally admitted the entire street being down might be considered a "fault"."
Two things come to mind here. Firstly - surely mains on a phone line would only affect the subscriber that the line belongs to? The phone lines are designed to be pretty resilient, dealing with surges from lightning and nearby electric lines, plus the POTS ring signal itself is an AC of around 90V. When lightning nuked my Livebox (burnt it out inside), everything "just worked" after plugging in a spare. There's no way an engineer could have been out and fixed the hardware in that short time, so I assume the exchange either failed over to a backup bit of hardware or it absorbed the energy in a less destructive manner than the Livebox.
Secondly - there are a lot of diagnostics in a modern exchange. I'm surprised it took that long for the exchange (or an engineer) to probe the line and notice the mains present. If nothing else, I would have imagined that it would have presented a fairly distinctive hum...
...assuming that it didn't cause the phones of the subscriber who put the mains into the line to ring continuously. [back in my youth I made an effective phone ringing simulator by stepping the mains down to 110V (a UK to US (isolated) transformer) and then routing the output via a relay controlled by a BBC Micro; put that into the phone and it'll ring - used that for a school play]
Biting the hand that feeds IT
