[simplechamp]

Trust me, I am pretty close to doing some "percussive maintenance" on the modem.

I think it has to be either hardware failure in the modem, or something happened to the coax cable or the junction where it connects on the utility pole outside. Just seems weird that the upload is fine and only the download is affected. I had a suspicion that they might be throttling my connection due to excessive bandwidth usage, but I really doubt it. I never download anything pirated/illegal and you think they would tell me if there was a new bandwidth quota or policy in place.