That's almost certainly a flaw in the wire somewhere. Any trees near the line in your area?
If you can demonstrate to your ISP that it's broken, they will almost certainly repair it (although not necessarily fast). If you can demonstrate that you've had degraded service, you might even squeeze compensation out of them.
The only trees in my area are too small and young to have broken or disrupted the line. It is possible that the bizarre system the national telecom company installed 16-ish years ago (pair gains? i don't entirely understand it, but it's something like multiple houses being treated as one, and split at the premises) might have something to do with it, but uh, i don't know.
Anyway, stability wise it's much improved; the dropouts have gone from twelve to thirty times an hour to maybe three times a day. Speed wise it has not improved one bit; it's been very slow, probably not more than 10-40KB/s, where our normal maximum is 150-180KB/s.
I've tried mentioning to my parents that the internet is basically unusable at home, and as we're out of contract we can just move to a new ISP, but it doesn't really affect them as they just use their 4G connection on their phone, so their motivation is almost-nil. I'd front up for it myself, but currently I have nowhere near enough money to go to a new ISP.
For the price they're paying ($90AUD/mo), it's really fucking shit. A comparable costing service with any competitor now that the NBN has gone through would see us getting 50Mb/s and an unlimited download rate, vs 1Mb/s if we're lucky and 300GB.
Current speed test: