Why?

I don't believe Comcast has the ability to do this. I don't even think Comcast provides router/modem combinations for business class since so many customers run their own setups. Can you clarify what you are referring to?

http://www.netgear.com/service-providers/products/cable/gateways/cg3000dcr.aspx

"The NETGEAR CG3000DCR Gigabit Router with integrated 8 x 4 DOCSIS® 3.0 cable modem delivers high data rate performance as well as hosting capability for business networking."

Part of that is BS, but it's not the part where it's a combination router/modem.

No problem at all.

Tremendous packet loss (as high as 70% at times), latency (up to 1.8-2 seconds to ping other devices connected directly to the router).  Power cycling generally solves the issue.  As does restructuring my network entirely so that as little information as possible actually travels through the router.

Actually, it's been stable all day today, though, even with very high continual bandwidth usage (I'm a developer for software that synchronizes databases over networks, which is why I get twitchy when my network is unreliable).  I'm not sure whether it's luck, or some setting I changed yesterday fixed it, or if I'm just hallucinating this entire experience.

Interesting, I was unaware of that, sorry. 

What type of issues are you directly seeing?

Are you able to login to the router and confirm if the router firmware was upgraded or downgraded? 

Also, when do you notice this issue occurring? Does it seem to during peak or middle of the night? 

>Are you able to login to the router and confirm if the router firmware was upgraded or downgraded? 

Yes.  Basically, I noticed at some point that my connection had been really stable for a while.  I logged in and saw that I was at 1.34.something.

Then I noticed a couple of days ago that my connection had returned to POS status.  I logged in and saw that I was at 1.33.03.

>Also, when do you notice this issue occurring? Does it seem to during peak or middle of the night?

It seems to be a "buildup" sort of thing.  It starts out fine and gets worse and worse.  However, generally, I think it's worst on weekends.  That's actually when I use the internet least, except perhaps for streaming video (Netflix, etc).  I'm moderately aware of the peering nightmare between Comcast and Cogent, and of the recent resolution, but it hasn't really made much of a difference in this case. 

Hard to say what's going on here. Just to confirm if you bypass the router is everything normal? You may also try doing a full router reset, definitely not optimal but if there is a firmware version issue doing a full reset may allow it to properly upgrade itself again. 

 >I'm moderately aware of the peering nightmare between Comcast and Cogent, and of the recent resolution, but it hasn't >really made much of a difference in this case. 

They've already reached an agreement, Netlifx is paying Comcast to deliver their content. Basicially instead of Netflix paying Cogent to deliver their content, Netflix is bypassing the middle man and paying Comcast and other ISP's directly. In theory this should result in better video quaility with a smoother playback. 

Right.  That's the resolution I was referring to.

That's definitely odd. So doing a router reset corrected the issue or are you still having issues as of now? If you are still having issues it'd be worth trying to get Comcast to exchange the router, but I'm not sure how much that'd help.