smtp.cox.net not connecting

I am using Thunderbird on a Windows 7 laptop from my home.  Since last monday I had been unable to send mail because smtp.cox.net was unavailable.  Yesterday I tried pinging it and it too failed.  Then after a few hours I pinged again and this time it responded.  I then sent a test mail to my own address through TBird and it worked.  Great, I thought, the system has corrected itself but then receiving email stopped.  The program would say connecting to pop.cox.net and then stop.  I have used this  service for many years and while there had been a few temporary outages with smtp, it had always self-corrected within a few hours and never with pop.  Sending/receiving mail within myemail.cox.net has worked fine.  Another funny thing, when smtp started working and pop was still working, a bunch of old emails also got pulled.

Guess what.  Right after I posted my previous reply, pop.cox.net started working just fine.  Since everything at my end has remained the same, common sense tells me that the problem is with COX.  Hope my luck holds.

Well, as I had feared, my luck just ran out.  SMTP is acting up again and when I ping it, it loses most of the packets.  Unfortunately ping does not work with POP and when I try to receive mail it hangs up, fails to connect and takes an interminably long time to download.  Even signing in to this forum has become a chore.  My first attempt gave a "There was an unexpected internal error.  Please try again." message.  Retry hung up.  Then I refreshed and after several minutes of wait it finally connected.

Anyway, I have given up.  As far as I can tell, this will be a perpetual headache from now on and will never get fixed.  I have chatted with tech support several times and it was a most aggravating experience.  I never had such a frustrating experience in twenty years.