Your issue may be congestion at that comcast gateway in which case your issue should only usually be evident during nightly peak hour timings.
See if something like www.wtfast.com has any impact on what you are seeing, it has a 14 day free trial i believe but if this stabilises things then it is a bandaid in the short term.
It also provides additional connection stats and gives you graphs of what your default conditions are and how much it is helping.
Just wanted to follow up on this. I tried using wtfast and it seemed to improve the connection and lag issues, but I was only able to get a 3 day trial so didn't get to confirm that. I think it routed my path to the star forge server around Level3.net which helped, although there were still minor periodic lag spikes. I agree that this is probably due to using a shared internet connection during peak hours and it's just going to be a limitation of the network no matter if I use a vpn/gpn. So I will probably just need to live with it and subscribe to wtfast, or pay for a dedicated cable/dsl connection. Here is a report from wtfast - I couldn't find where it indicates whether or not there was an improvement, so I was just relying on my impression of in-game performance.
Thanks again to proxos for your help!
