I don't have any proof I can share, as I only had the box provided by them for a month prior to ponying up the $30/mo fee to run my own equipment w/ unlimited and that was over a year ago. I'm well aware of the technical meaning of QoS. My specific claim is that Comcast uses their provided CPE to de-prioritize traffic which is throughput heavy like downloads of updates/games via Xbox Live, Steam, etc and to prioritize traffic which is most noticeable to users (Netflix, VOIP) and they implement throttling. You could argue that this is perfectly reasonable and what you would expect from network behavior anyway, but I see it as customer-hostile because I pay for a certain amount of throughput to be available to me and I want the ISP to act as a dumb pipe and leave it up to me to make these types of decisions, and not to have traffic de-prioritized or throttled at their whim. I had a 20% increase in average throughput downloading games via Steam using my own equipment vs the Comcast provided equipment with no other changes, as an example of the direct impacts. The purpose for Comcast doing this is network management on their part, they heavily oversubscribe their service and use network management techniques to apportion available throughput in whatever way is most advantageous to Comcast.
You can make whatever argument you want that Comcast's behavior is reasonable and necessary or that this isn't consumer-hostile. You won't convince me. I pay for gigabit connectivity, I should get gigabit connectivity. If they can't offer gigabit connectivity, they shouldn't offer it, rather than lying to me and then penalizing my traffic. It's that simple. Companies can't take a product to market they're incapable of actually offering and then act like it's the customer's fault, it's fraud. Nearly every residential ISP in the US behaves in these ways, it's not unique to Comcast, and it's not aligned to what is promised and offered in their advertising/contracts.