cable/static problems

I've been having problems with dial-up for a while (yes, yes, you can stop laughing now) with not being able to hold a decent connection for very long. Most of the time, the connection will "stop working", i.e., it will stop transmitting and receiving data. This has been a constant problem, but has been even more of a problem in the past year or so, because I have had to use a 15/20 ft phone extension cable to connect my modem to the wall jack.

The thing is, the wall jack was added some while ago by a technician, and runs along the outside of my house to the network interface box. Now, I believe that first of all, this outside cable contributes to some of the static because the other day during a lighting storm I picked up a phone which I plugged into that jack, and pressed a button, and listened to the silence. There was crackling and static. However, since that incident I haven't heard any static/crackling.

So, that would leave the long extension cable as some sort of interference-collecting element. Without having to move the computer close to the jack, what can I do? I've been looking a cable with uses CAT networking cable but is modified on the ends ot use RJ-11 jacks (http://www.staples.com/Catalog/Browse/SKU.asp?BCFlag=False&PageType=1&SKU=im1151537). Would this help in my situation if I replaced my current extension with the CAT connection?

Also, what can I do to reduce interference on the regular cable (the extension plugs into a surge suppresor, from which comes a regular phone cable and into the modem)? For example, is there something I could wrap it in to potentially reduce any interference?

Oh, and I do not believe it's an ISP problem because I have been through many ISP's and the problem still exists. Also, the modem is not at fault because a have a decent modem (a USR hardware modem 5610B) and I had the same problems (though more so) with my older winmodem.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ashish34 on 06/27/04 05:59 PM.</EM></FONT></P>