I work from home, which means I'm hyper-sensitive to my internet quality. I also sometimes work through the night to early in the morning.
I've found that my Comcast connection here in San Francisco fairly reliably drops for a few minutes every day at around 2-3 am. Then it comes back and works find again. I've thought about calling them about this before, but I'm not sure that I want to spend a couple hours on the phone convincing them it's a real issue.
I had that happen on my Comcast connection but it was always between 2-3pm. It wouldn't drop completely though it would just suddenly start dropping 95% of the packets and ping times would go up to 2-3 seconds. I pestered them about it for a month and eventually a tech happened to arrive while it was happening, he called their CO and they found they had a network switch that was intermittently malfunctioning. After that it never happened again and for helping them troubleshoot it they gave me 4 years of free HBO and the cell number for one of their engineers so I wouldn't have to sit through tier 1 and 2 support again.
I live near Atlanta and I get the same issue around the same time. It's not reliably every night (thankfully, since I'm on almost every night) but it is at least once or twice a week, sometimes more, for 15-45 minutes. I can see in the modem logs where I'm losing my connection to them and the house phone also gets disconnected.
I'm in the same boat as you where making the phone call feels like a huge hassle. But it's interesting seeing a few other people with this same problem, maybe I should call them after all.
That drop is what I was describing in my other comment. Happens generally between 1am-3am.
When I've called about it they say they can't send a tech out at night to test, so nothing has ever officially be done about it.
Sounds like more of a systematic issue though if you're seeing the same thing in SF (I'm in San Jose). But like I said, it's probably been a couple months at least since the last time I had that issue, or noticed it.
I've found that my Comcast connection here in San Francisco fairly reliably drops for a few minutes every day at around 2-3 am. Then it comes back and works find again. I've thought about calling them about this before, but I'm not sure that I want to spend a couple hours on the phone convincing them it's a real issue.