Hi, if you are only 4houses away then I would expect a cable length less than 300m even if there was a convoluted cable run across the street, up the other end of the sub division and back again I would doubt you would be more than 1km of cable from the cabinet. In which case the reported line attenuation of 36dB (approx 2.6km of cable) indicates there is a bad joint or some device across the line (alarm system perhaps?).

Does your modem give error stats as well, this may show if there are packets begin dropped and retried which would indicate some other line related issue, ie loss or noise, this would cause sporadic lagging.

I must stress that internet performance will dramatically improve when going from a direct exchange connection to a cabinet due to a reduction in line length, if not then purhaps there is a poor joint or MDF jumpering thats creating an abnormally high line attenuation and purhaps packet loss.

The erratic change in sync speed indictates some erratic line condition, once again I suspect a bad joint somewhere purhaps this poor connection was created (accidentially) in the change over to the cabinet, not the first time I have dealt with such a issue.

If you are under 1km of cable from the cabinet you should expect sync speeds of 15Mb/s or better, not 10Mb/s.

Cyril