I've had a friend use an IP testing tool, and confirmed that there is huge packet loss even without involving my modem AT ALL. It spikes worst roughly 2 minutes near xx:15 and xx:45 on the clock. Say, 10:13 PM, then 10:43 PM, then 11:13PM... It's not just some ICMP issue because web pages keep timing out and there are points where even after rebooting the modem and only having a single computer (not running BT or the like), I get normal speeds on DL at various speed-testing sites, but 100Kb/s or even timeouts on UL. When it's "not so bad", it goes up to 6Mb/s but still randomly times out. The signal levels on the modem all check out (in fact, they're near ideal), and the modem itself reports no uncorrectable errors in the 'CM' part of Xfinity status. Way I noticed this: DNS was giving me issues even with changed DNS servers. Then I noticed that even a web page with DNS lookup already done, would randomly get "empty response" as Chrome called it. In other words, an empty HTML file.
Is there some network-wide issue with Comcast right now? Just curious - going to gather my logs from diagnostic tools and ask them for technical support on their own support chat/forum. Wondering if anyone else has noticed. Kind of ironic that the last time I had trouble it was the modem and the network was fine. ;)
Ways to help them convince their bosses to let them fix it:
Gather information from both sides. So, if you have another technical friend or rent a VPS, then you should get some traffic logs from at least one of them as well as on your own modem. Make sure it's not just on your end!
Try a non-ICMP tool, if they claim it's "just ICMP getting QoSed". In other words, ICMP will get dropped from some IP addresses entirely, in a tracert (example, also includes ping or the like) command. PingPlotter will report those as "100.0%" PL (packet loss).
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