Lightning keeps wiping our router and phone

[Harry Bloomfield]

Around 30 years ago at around 2am we had a local strike to the church tower 100 yards away. I was in bed, fast asleep and I swear that either due to the noise or the impulse, I jumped completely clear of the mattress. The tower had lightning protection, but it had blown out by the strike and it had tracked inside the tower, blowing plaster off the walls. Here it destroyed my expensive 1m steerable sat dish and receiver, a dial-up modem (but no damage to the PC it was plugged into) and took many phone lines in the village out. BT spent weeks repairing the damaged lines, but our Trimphone survived. I had various radio antennas up with receivers and transmitters plugged in, but none were damaged.

 

[echoes]

The house I lived in was struck by lightning through the TV aerial when I was a child.
The TV's plug was shot physically out of the socket and the TV was ruined.

 

[SimonH2]

As already said, it's a bit of a black art, and nothing will protect against a direct or very close strike.
At a previous job, had similar issues to the OP at the boss's house where both phone and power were overhead and came from different directions. Quite frequently they'd lose equipment to lightning - but only equipment connected to both mains and phone.
You can "sort of" protect a single item of equipment by routing ALL cables to it via a good quality surge protector. So with a router you'd route it's power and phone via a good surge protector - and any network cables. However, if you have any wired networking, this will transfer some of the problem to other equipment.
The better arrangement is to have a whole house protector and route the power and phone via that. But, you will need to route the phone cable to the CU as even a foot or two of thick cable is ineffective - so no good having a separate protector for the phone line (unless it's right next to the power one and linked by just a few inches of thick cable).
It's similar to how we create an equipotential zone with main/supplementary bonding. The difference is ghat if you were to try (for example) run a bit of 10mm² half way round the house from the CU to a surge protector for the phone line - then you'd be wasting your time. It's because the surge from lightning has such a fast rise time that the inductance in a length of cable makes it have a high impedance to the surge.
Ideally EVERY external connection (eg TV aerials, sat dishes, cable TV) needs to route via the one demarcation point and share the common point for surge protection.