Internet Spiking Issues After Optimization Work

Hey Xfinity Support,

My name is [Edited: Privacy], posting from Battle Creek, Michigan. I want to document a service issue that started right after Xfinity ran network optimization work in my area in late March 2026 (3/24 --> 3/31), because the timeline is too direct to ignore.

For about 9 months before that maintenance, my internet was rock solid. No issues, no complaints. During the optimization window my service was either completely dead or barely functional every morning/afternoon for about a week. Annoying, but I get it — maintenance happens, I was patient.

What I didn't sign up for was my service coming out the other side worse than it went in.

Ever since the work finished, I've been getting intermittent latency spikes while gaming. The connection is fine the vast majority of the time, which is actually what makes it harder to catch — but I've been running a continuous ping test today in the background and the results are pretty telling.

My baseline is clean. Nearly every ping sits between 19-29ms, which is healthy. But then this happens:

...time=25ms
...time=21ms
...time=803ms  ← spike
...time=22ms
...time=23ms

I logged four of these spikes — 803ms, 829ms, 851ms, and 812ms — all within a single monitoring session. What's concerning isn't just the spikes themselves, it's the pattern. They're hitting consistently every 6 to 9 minutes. That kind of regularity isn't random interference or a flaky cable — that looks like a scheduled network event. Something polling, reconnecting, or reacquiring on a cycle. A DOCSIS channel reacquisition, a node polling issue, something along those lines. Whatever it is, it wasn't happening before your maintenance work.

In a real-time game, an 800ms spike can be annoying to catastrophic. When it's happening like clockwork every few minutes, it's not something you just "deal with."

Nothing on my end has changed. Same router, same setup, same everything. The only variable was Xfinity's network optimization in my area. Nine months of clean connection, one week of Xfinity touching the network, and now this pattern.

I'm not looking for a "have you tried restarting your modem" response. I'd genuinely appreciate someone looking at what node or routing changes were made in the Battle Creek area during that maintenance window and whether something got misconfigured on my segment. The regularity of these spikes strongly suggests this is a network-side issue, not something on my end.

Happy to provide account info or any additional diagnostics to help narrow it down.

Thanks,
[Edited: Privacy]