Umm? I think I'm missing something? The wiring goes lamp post to house, box on side of house, cable comes out, goes to router (sometimes with several bit and prices coming off for other jack points). I replaced all the wiring between the box on the side of the house and the router. Connecting directly to the router is what I was doing the whole time.

"In a fit of rage I paid someone to cat 6 the house."

Made is sound like you paid to cat6 the house in the hopes it would fix your speed issues. Did you mean RG6 from pole to house? Cat6 is the Ethernet cabling. Even then, if the issue was due to poor cabling from pole to house, that should be apparent in signal levels on the cable modem diagnostics page.

Yeah, it was apparent that massive line noise was the issue. I'm not sure about other countries, but cat6 is standard spec cabling for house data wiring (for phone, and data) here in NZ - the line (fibre or copper) switches to cat6 at the point where the line company ownership ceases and the homeowners bit begins. The line company always blame the last few metres of cable, which, not coincidentally , isn't owned by them. I was not aware that the router could help me diagnose the exact source of the noise - surely it just knows total noise between exchange and router?