ACtheTROLL, When you are looking at a melted telephone, and a frazzled motherboard, you are not really bothered about the technicalities of whether it's a strike or a near miss. I've lost two phones, 3 modems and a printer to lightning (before i installed the protectors).
Here in Greece, most electricity meters are encased in the concrete gateposts: our friend's gatepost was hit, and it literally exploded, and the fusebox in the house was blown out of the wall.
When I lost the printer, I was sitting in my office with the windows open and the (metal) shutter closed. I actually saw a blue bolt shoot between the louvres of the shutters, and all my gear went down. Everything survived bar the printer - the psu was roasted. (Of course. I wouldn't expect a protector on the phone line to avert something like that).
My current set up is like this:
Phone line to protector 1, in office
Protector to filter
filter to ADSL router on one side and ISDN box on the other (I have ADSL over ISDN)
Output of second ISDN line to protector 2
protector 2 to line to house
protector 3 in house to phone.