I have to give credit where it's due - after the last Comcast guy came out last week and replaced the outside line, they set up another appointment for today when I still had problems. The tech who came out - guy named Kevin - was very professional, got a new cable modem installed, worked through a provisioning problem on the phone, and then called me back just now to check on the problem - which seems to have cleared up - I haven't had an outage since he left. So my hat's off to the local Comcast tech folks. As much as I've complained, they were right on top of this one.