Internet Slow and Intermittent Dropping

I’ve been a Xfinity / Comcast customer for over 25 years. 9 years at the current address. The service was almost flawless for 8 of those years, but the last year’s been challenging. For the past few weeks, I’ve been having lots of issues with internet being slow (1/10 to 1/3 of my 1gb speed.) The drops are pretty quick. It almost feels like a DNS resolution issue, but that’s not it. The drops used to be much longer, but after removing my Xi6 streaming box, the intervals have been shorter. Since this was my 3rd Xi6 box in the past 6 months, I’ve decided to cancel the streaming part of my services. 

For the remaining internet, I have tried all of the standard troubleshooting myself, with the chat bot, and with an agent. I haven’t swapped out the gateway (used to do this a lot with a previous issue) because it’s not showing any issues. For background, last fall I was having internet drops and was on the older analog X1 TV 4k box. After having 3 techs visit, one even re-cabled from the home demarc to the Gateway - single run,  no splitters - and ultimately the last tech that was here said that I was moved to a split node at some point, Xfinity was not going to upgrade the infrastructure and the only way to solve the problem was to move to streaming television. 

That solution seemed to work until last month. I’ve noticed that speeds do seem to slow down even more when it rains, but we haven’t had much rain, so not lot of data. My thought is that there is a cable issue from the house to the pole. I remember talking to a guy in a bucket truck when all of this other stuff was being troubleshot last year. He was there for another reason, but his theory was there was either a damaged cable, or a bad amplifier (in addition to validating the split node thing.) Since moving to streaming seemed to free things up, I never pursued it…plus he said I’d never know if they came out to fix it since it would be an internal ticket.

TBH, I have ordered AT&T fiber and a load balancing firewall so I can have something that works consistently. I intend to keep both services if Xfinity can fix this, but I am not too confident as this has been an off and on issue for so long. Is there any way to get a guy with a bucket truck and testing equipment to check this last leg for issues for a final resolution?