I am about a mile and a quarter from my exchange. My nearest Infinity cabinet is a few hundred yards from my house yet I am connected to a cabinet a few hundred yards from the exchange and about a mile from me.

Doesn't this defeat the object of Infinity as I have nearly as much copper in my connection than before Infinity I download at about 21Mb.

First of all, it isn't an Infinity cabinet. Infinity is the name for BT Retail's fibre products. The cabinets are owned and operated by Openreach, which any ISP such as TalkTalk and Sky pay to provide fibre services to their customers.
I'd suggest that the fibre cabinet closest to you isn't the one that serves your cabinet as they can only be placed 100m or so apart. There will more than likely be another fibre cabinet closer to your cab that will serve it, across the road, round the corner etc.

Fibre cabinets are "paired" with an original cabinet which serves your home. As mentioned, they have to be no more than 100m or so apart.

Fibre is laid to the new cabinet and then the connection is "jumped" to the original cabinet to provide the service. As a matter of course, OpenReach do not re-route phone lines.

Phone lines are often not provided via the shortest route from the exchange to your house, especially for older houses. They will have been provided relative to the capacity available at the time of installation and often take a route "round the houses".

I seem to recall that in the early days of ADSL BT / OpenReach had absolutely no idea of cable routes in Milton Keynes and had great difficulty in providing ADSL as a result.

Brian

Both the cabinets I referred to are several hundred metres from my house and the cabinet I am connected to is the furthest one mentioned according to the engineer who connected me, because I asked what cabinet it is my connection is going to.

This still means that there is a lot more copper in my Infinity connection than there is fibre - that is the only point I was trying to make. I am getting better download speeds than before I had Infinity but I am disappointed it is not more.

I too have the same problem - and I too am in New Milton. The cabinet that provides my infinity service is 400 metres or more from home, despite the fact that there is a BT cabinet 20 metres away. Certainly the speed is better on infinity2 but a lot slower than I was expecting and was suggested by BT before upgrading to infinity 2.
All I have been told is that I am on a Range B (Impacted) line which gives speeds, in my case) of up to 33% less than a Range A (Clean) line. But they cannot or will not say why they cannot create a 'clean' connection.

This is why Britain needs pure fibre connections so that no loss of speed, or hardly any at all, will happen. We might get them.....eventually.