my home pod pauses for about 2 seconds then comes back about once every 10 seconds

What happens if you turn off the 5GHz radio and stick to 2.4?

tt2

Happens to me when I play a radio from Apple Music, too. I never noticed it during regular AirPlay streaming, or direct playback of Apple Music titles though.

Sound mutes either for a few seconds or indefinitely. I have to re-ask Siri for the playback to be resumed, which leads me to think that this is a buffering issue.

Edit: I shall add that both my HomePods meet this issue, and are connected to my router on a strong 5GHz Wi-Fi network. For the record, an iPhone X near to the HomePod with the potentially weakest signal gets around 70-100Mpbs download speed.

I tried this at some point, to no avail. There were several additional issues on top of this in the living room, that is a bit remote, and where there are a lot of devices running on the frequency, besides my neighbors' Wi-Fi.

Edit: I also checked for some QoS / CoS settings on the router, but it doesn't seem like my ISP allows people to hack this.