I'm about 30 miles north of Knoxville, TN and I feel your pain. Packet loss, pages loading slower than they should and sometimes just timing out without loading at all. I've been reporting trouble since the end of May. And get this, both telephone tech support and a visiting technician have seen problems and still haven't done anything about it! When I asked telephone tech support to escalate me to tier 2.5 and the technician who visited to get a line specialist to look at my problem, both acted kind of funny and didn't say no, but didn't say yes either. It appears that my problem is with packet loss according to telephone tech support - who also said the problem was DEFINITELY outside of my house (of course, I already knew this). I've also noticed that the time of day does seem to be relevant to speed also - if I remember correctly, cable can bottleneck, right?
Last week I talked to a HSI supervisor in Knoxville. He said he would have his network specialists look into the problem and he would email me copies of his correspondence with them to keep me informed. Guess what? That's right - I have yet to receive the first email. The only action taken was to have a supervisor at the local office in my town to call me to follow up. The first follow up call was right after I talked to the supervisor in Knoxville. I explained my problem and the history of my contacting Comcast. He said he would look into the issue. The next call was last Friday at 4:50 pm, 10 MINUTES before the office closed for the weekend! I wasn't home at the time. He left a message on my answering machine that ended with, "we will be here until 5 pm today". Outrageous! (and laughable)....sheesh
One other thing. Not long after first reporting my problem, I had a Comcast technician tell me to use Testmy.net for doing speed tests on my connection. Funny, but Testmy.net always gives me 4MB no matter when I run a test. BUT, when I use the speed test sites (it doesn't matter which) on DSLreports, I always get a slower speed that matches the actual performance of my connection. Kind of fishy if you ask me. Of course, I consider the DSLreports tests to be more reliable.