About once a month, my cable internet stops working: the modem appears to have no connection (i.e. it cannot ping the upstream gateway). This is often preceded or followed by heavy packet loss (I measured 40% via ping) and consequent slow connections. I do not touch the modem or plug in between it working and not working; generally an outage may last on the order of hours before inexplicably working again. I believe neighbors are similarly affected; the most recent time this happened, I noticed that if I turned off my modem and connected to a nearby UPC Wi-Free, that connection also did not work.
I called tech support about this a few times, but they have no answer. I had a technician come to my apartment, and he had no ideas. (By the time he showed up, three days later, the connection was working again.)
To be frank, I have yet to speak to a representative with any technical knowledge or any apparent concern that customers in my building or neighborhood are experiencing such outages. In addition to the multi-hour outages that I notice about monthly, according to an every-two-minutes cron job I have running to record ping status, there are regular outages lasting ten minutes or so as well, and frequent problems with dropped packets and slow connections. Because tech support calls must be scheduled more than a few days in advance, by the time the support visit my apartment, the outage is of course over, and they conclude that there is no issue and I should just call back the next time this happens.
Before I switch service providers, is there any recommended approach to escalating to someone at UPC who can proactively investigate this issue and resolve it?