Sorry - I missed your followup question. Usually, I like responding within a few hours, not the few days it took me here!

Unfortunately, I can't offer much more insight into the problem. I think there's a huge chance (like almost certain) that this problem is in your local loop someplace - either the cable lines themselves, or a piece of hardware very close to you. If your cable company has some way of troubleshooting the problem from the support center, I'd recommend pushing them to use these tools. Often, we see that the troubleshooting tools available to the cable company (often provided by their hardware manufacturer) has great stats and tools to show the problem. If they could do a stream test and send data for 30 or 60 minutes and look at the stats, they should be able to see the problem, and might have some kind of method to solve the problem.

I've never worked for a cable company, or gotten a lot of information from cable companies directly, but I've anecdotally seen some pretty compelling evidence been collected by a support technician that supports the local loop theory.

Temperature could be an issue, but that's not a normal problem (we've never heard of a case that was temperature related). 20 degrees of ambient temperature shouldn't be able to affect things that much, but ... you never know. There are all sorts of things that could be time based. Maybe there's one guy on your local loop that hosts game servers for a game group in Hawaii and they play at the hours you're seeing problems. Of course, that wouldn't really explain why it happens on weekends too.

The bottom line, though, is that we can speculate all we want on what the problem could be. What you've got to do is convince your ISP that they need to spend some time solving this problem. That will probably take some phone calls and persistence.

Good luck.

- Pete