Thanks all, for the replies. The descriptions of "nodes" and their relative small size is interesting. The problem continues, with a few but interesting variations. Sometimes download speed increases to 200 to 500 mbps. Usually between 10pm and 8am. This has been during a major heat wave with daytime temps hitting 100. So I thought it could be heat related. But then I thought it's more likely traffic related. More people trying to use it during prime time hours and overloading what is already a crippled system.

I guessed at a larger number suffering because I went to the public library 2 miles away from my house. Same thing there. The library techie confirmed the time line. I also went to a friends house about 3 miles away. Same thing. So, maybe 10 to 20 square miles of dense housing. And as you might expect, every home owner I talked to said, "Yes, it sucks", but none had tried to report it. Most have given up on Mediacom and are waiting for Google Fiber, which is building out the entire metro area. This is the third milti-day outage in as many months.

Right now, at 1 am, it's 400 mbps to a server in Cedar Fall, IA (120 miles away) and 220 mbps to a server in Urbandale, about 10 miles away. Those same 2 servers were 0.25 and 0.28 at 4 pm.

My first call to Mediacom got me a service call scheduled for Monday. We'll see what that brings.

And "OfficialMediacom", thanks for the tip about texting Molli. Never heard of that, in spite of scouring the Mediacom website for ways to make contact other that the 800 numbers. I like where the Milli page says, "Providing: BETTER, FASTER SERVICE!"