How does anyone actually get support from this company?

Your automated "assistant" is very nice, it will happily walk you through loop after loop of repetitive troubleshooting steps with ZERO ability to recall that it's already taken you through those steps multiple times within the last 15 minutes.

When you finally exhaust the steps its default response is to close the "troubleshooting" session.

If you tell it to get you an agent, you may eventually get a rep to initiate a chat session, they will drop a greeting and if you've looked away from your phone for more than 45 seconds, they'll simply end the session before you can respond...forcing you all the way back to the beginning of the automated troubleshooting.

If you actually manage to get someone to look at the issue, if the problem requires any level of knowledge or effort that isn't basically part of the same checklist provided by the automated "assistant" they will tell you they are escalating the case to Level 2 and that you'll receive a call back.  About two hours later you'll get a ticket closure notice with a survey...Responding to the survey that the issue wasn't resolved does not result in any follow up action...You guys could've at least closed the loop by dropping me back to the support "assistant" again...At least then I'd have been able to take a moment to appreciate the sadistic artistry of whoever designed the support workflows.

And I looked for a number to call to speak to a human, found a post on this very forum with a number provided by a verified xfinity employee saying their team would get the call...Called the number, was directed back to the automated "support" assistant, saying "No" and asking for a "human agent" ultimately results in a final message of "Your next steps are with the automated support assistant," and an immediate call disconnection.  Now that's the kind of inspired sadism that someone who appreciates the absurdity of life can truly enjoy, thanks for the smile.

I'm writing this assuming it'll get a laugh from whoever actually reads these posts at xfinity and perhaps the wider public, maybe a "verified xfinity employee" will respond...likely with a link to the support assistant or a reposting of the phone number that leads back again to the support assistant...

As for the issue itself, it's likely going to be complicated to solve.  

The underlying issue wouldn't really be a problem, it's almost never noticeable when watching streaming media (the use of UDP and frame buffering means I only VERY RARELY see any issues with YouTube or Netflix)...

BUT I work from home and most of my day requires VPN connectivity and an RDP session into a work machine.  And EVERY time I see my VPN Client go into a "Reconnecting" state and/or the RDP session drop into a "attempting to reconnect" state, I can flip over to the continuous ping to 4.2.2.2 I keep running in the background and see a very consistent pattern of 2-10 timeouts within a 30-60 second window of time. 

The VPN is setup to allow split tunneling, so the egress traffic to 4.2.2.2 is going straight out through the xfinity connection.  So the packet drops are not a result of the VPN connection being unstable. 

The issue typically resolves itself within 60-90 seconds (most of that time being me waiting for the VPN client to complete the reconnect process or RDP to reconnect the session).  Every once in a while I'll get completely disconnected from the VPN and will need to re-authenticate, but that's fairly rare.

The issue typically happens in waves, I might see it happen 2-5 times in close succession followed by a few hours of stable connectivity, then more packet drops and connection issues.

This issue started in December or January and has gotten very slowly worse.  I had no issues the first two months of service.

As for troubleshooting steps:

Yes I've connected directly to the modem.

Yes I've swapped ethernet cables three times.

I've tightened and retightened the coax at the wall and the modem.

I've swapped out the coax between the modem and the wall.

I've rebooted the devices (laptop, modem, and router) multiple times during the different iterations of troubleshooting...

Yes, I've powered everything off and brought it up in sequence waiting for each piece to establish a connection before powering on the next (modem, router, laptop / or modem laptop when bypassing the router).

I've updated network drivers and tested from 5 different computers of various makes/models.

Every 4th or 5th time a "check for problems" is initiated by the automated "assistant" it comes back with "an issue" but most of the time the signal is apparently good enough to not be a concern.

At this point I suspect the issue is either:

1) A bad connection between my house and the local uplink (I'm in an apartment, so there are probably dozens of lines feeding into the local box).  In which case the solution will be sending a tech onsite to check the levels and connections.

OR

2) There's some traffic management solution that's changing the route paths for egress traffic going out to the Internet, the routing sorts itself out in a couple seconds but the firewall my VPN connects to has to sort out the session state because the return path on the traffic has changed...In which case I need someone who actually understands the network architecture to provide a fix on the backend or tell me what options I might have, up to just switching service providers.

Oh well, I doubt this will get any more traction than my other attempts at support, but at least I'll be able to cut and paste the issue definition and previously attempted troubleshooting steps.

To any xfinity customers out there reading this, good luck and Godspeed.