Sorry for my absence in this thread. I got busy and didn't get a chance to further experiment with this and then took some vacation for the holidays.
In any case, upon my return about a week ago, I also found that I was getting the 10x more than what I was getting before; 12Mbps down and 12Mbps up. I am expecting ~100Mbps down and 12Mbps up. It's still better than 1. The only thing I can think of is that all my equipment were power cycled on both sites at some point due to maintenance work at one site and a blackout at the other (I don't have UPS for the network equipment). It's unnerving, but at least it's up and functional for now. I just hope that it stays this way.
The 12Mbps down problem might be an issue with the Motorola/Arris Cable modem. There is quite a bit of chatter on the internet about the Arris cable modem having issues with VPNs. I will try a Netgear cable modem and report back.
I appreciate all the help and suggestions from the forum.