ISP question

Hi, I have kind of a loaded question. First off I would like to know what can be the central cause of packet loss thru a DNS hop, or a switch/router. I say this because I have comcast cable, and lately my internet sucks, I use graphic tracer called PingPlotter to see where I am loosing my packets and it tells me, for ex. I am getting tbr1-13.dlstx.ip.att.net (Is the first of many ATT Servers tahts causing me to loose 80% packets for a ping to Worldofwarcraft.com.
Now the cable company can't come out till thursday, which is normal for a cable company.

Now I am gonna let you in a few things I know that the service people at a cable company actually can do at there computers(Teir 1 support), A. 15% per node of offline people is an acceptable percantage of failure for internet, B Any support rep can reboot your internet remotley at any time, for no reason what so ever, I know I did it a few times to disgruntled customers who were jerks. C They can see everything. They can see how many computers are connected, Your Routers information etc. All the sub IPs distrubted to each computer, Ping in and and Ping out from those computers thru a Web based program called Polaris. Back to issue at hand.

Primarly I play WoW, and at peak hours, 5pm- 9pm I get VISCOUS lag, and its not the recent patchs thats to blame, at least not whole heartidly. I used speakeasy.net to gauge my internets true speed, and lately its been about 10-15% or less of what I am paying for. From all the signs I basically gather that there are too many people on my node for me to get reliable gaming service thru the cable company. So should I switch to dsl? any ideas thoughts?