So that's why a 2 systems were getting crappy speeds. Yes, 2. It had been used only to split a single drop from another switch between two systems.
New drop, happy clients.
Some stuff here is museum material.
Probably not, the costs were essentially just sticking ethernet ports on the walls next to the phone ports and rewiring the existing wires to those ports. And back when this was done (whenever we got DSL, around 2005 maybe?) fiber tech was probably prohibitively expensive. I haven’t looked up how much fiber modems cost but it would probably be more expensive even today.