Not really a mile but typically the piece of cable between your house and the local telephone exchange; it can also be generalised to mean the final connection between supplier equipment and a customer connection.

In current Broadband terms the further away from the telephone exchange you aware the poorer your broadband signal may be (and the slower the speed of downloading files). The type and quality of cabling for the last mile varies wildly as much of it was originally only expected to run voice calls - but many newer builds use better cable. Fibre would be the optimum solution but it is very expensive to install.

This definition has been bought to you by: Jason Slater Weblog.