Hi all.. could really use some help. 25 year customer and having issues. I’ve been dealing with a strange intermittent issue and am hoping someone with DOCSIS/plant experience might have some ideas.

My connection will occasionally drop completely for roughly 30–60 seconds and then recover on its own. This is a new problem (2 weeks old) and is vastly affecting my work. It may happen once a day, or I may go almost two days without it happening.

When it happens, multiple devices lose service at the same time, including a TV connected directly to the Cox gateway and other equipment connected to the gateway. Everything comes back on its own shortly afterward. Internet is 100% out during that time as confirmed by a third party monitoring tool, and common sense. Internet and TVs go out and say they can’t connect.

The frustrating part is that the modem looks excellent whenever anyone checks it.

Typical readings while everything is working:

Downstream power: approximately -1 to -3 dBmV
SNR: approximately 42–44 dB
Upstream power: approximately 45 dBmV
Channels are locked and I’m not seeing an obvious pattern of uncorrectable errors.

The very short drops also don’t seem to leave anything obvious in the modem information I can access afterward.

Cox sent a field technician out. He cleaned up some older/unnecessary coax and connectors inside and then found an issue at the outside connection serving my house. It was very dirty. He cleaned that up, replaced/reterminated the connection and made sure everything was properly connected.

He also said he was seeing some type of signal/frequency abnormality farther upstream and opened another ticket to have the plant/node investigated.

I believe the outside cleanup ticket has now been completed, while the plant/node ticket may still be open.

After the outside repair, I went almost 48 hours without a drop, but then had another very brief one today at 107am PST.

Cox phone support says everything looks excellent when they check the modem in real time, but they tell me they don’t have access to historical information showing what the modem or node was doing during the 30–60 seconds when the failure actually occurred.

i have also ordered a replacement PW8 gateway to eliminate my current gateway as a possibility. The current PW8 is only about two years old.

For anyone familiar with Cox plant/CMTS diagnostics: what could cause a complete 30–60 second interruption and then recover so quickly that all of the modem levels look completely normal afterward?

Is there historical telemetry available to Cox plant/maintenance that could show what happened to my modem or other modems on the node at the exact time of one of these events?

And if the replacement PW8 does the same thing, what specifically should I ask Cox to investigate or escalate so I can get beyond repeatedly checking the modem while it happens to be working?

I’m mainly trying to figure out whether this sounds more like an intermittently failing gateway or a very brief RF/plant/node issue — and how someone at Cox can actually catch it when it happens.

Thanks so much.

Welcome to the Cox Community

Credit to Bill

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