Periodic quality issues with Comcast in area

[sollostech]

For the past few months we've been having quality issues with our Comcast internet. Basically every few hours it gets terrible for about 30 minutes or so and then clears up. This happens for a large area around us of several streets. Trying to think if there is any way I can identify the problem as we keep having Comcast come out and they say they fix it, but its not resolved. Wondering if some machine in the area is infected and doing this to us?

[cmb]

That's ugly indeed. Most likely one of two things if it equally affects everyone in your general area. There can be issues with signal strength to an entire area because of equipment issues. I ran into that where I used to live, and it took them near a month to find and fix the issue. Some kind of equipment issue along those lines is one possibility. Every scenario along those lines I've seen personally and with our support customers has been something along those lines.

The other most likely cause is congestion in the area in general, where Comcast may need to re-engineer that portion of the network to provide adequate bandwidth for the number of customers in that area. That doesn't sound like the issue in this case. The quality would be worst from like 6 PM to midnight local time roughly, assuming a residential area with typical residential traffic patterns. You wouldn't see issues outside of peak times if that were the case. This would also be something Comcast would notice and hopefully do something about.

It can't be as simple as a single infected machine. One person maxing out their bandwidth will have no measurable impact on everyone else.

[mikeisfly]

If you think that it might be a signal issue, when your internet starts to act up point your browser to http://192.168.100.1 that should give you a diagnostic page where you can see what's going on with the signal. If you don't know what the numbers mean post them here and I will interpret them. Might be a good idea to record what they look like when things are fine too, that way you have a good baseline.