CochiseKev's profile

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super slow speeds 0645-1845 daily

OK this is weird..

We have 500/10 service at home, same plan for years now. For the last 6-8 weeks, all day long our downstream speed hovers at about 10 mbps instead of 500 as it should be. Upstream unaffected - also stays around 10, which is where it belongs.

Went through 2 very painful tech support calls and after much arm-twisting, finally got them to schedule a truck roll. Tech comes out and finds that the line from the Cox terminal in front our house, to the connection on the house, to be very "noisy" due to the fact it was buried in the ground without being installed in conduit. He ASSumes this must be what's causing our anemic speeds. At the time I hadn't yet determined that it was a time-of-day specific thing so it made sense to me too. He ran a temp line from the street, and scheduled the line to be permanently replaced, in conduit, which has since happened. NO CHANGE in speeds, but knowing now that it's time-dependent, that makes sense.\

By taking a bunch of speedtest readings in recent weeks I've determined that the slowdown starts around 6:45 in the morning, and ends around 6:45 pm. At that time speeds return to 500+ mbps, usually closer to 600, which is how everything behaved until this started.

Can anyone at Cox offer some guidance here? Seems REALLY strange that this happens in a relatively exact 12-hour cycle. Almost seems like it's some sort of provisioning problem. HELP!!

Thanks

Kevin

Cochise County, AZ

Moderator

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1.1K Messages

Hi CochiseKev. The purpose of the Cox Forums is to allow customers to discuss technical topics related to residential Cox Cable, Telephone and High-Speed Internet services with other customers. This appears as if you may need someone to look into your account personally. We would definitely be able to assist you with this. Please reach out to us on X at CoxHelp via DM, visit us on Facebook via private message, or email us at cox.help@cox.com. Provide us the name on the account with the complete service address with a link to this thread so we can get started. Thanks,  Lisa, Cox Support Forums Moderator

Esteemed Contributor III

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3.5K Messages

Why does this look like someone may need to look into OP's account personally? Looks like basic troubleshooting to me.

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Thanks.. already sent a detailed email with full account info and more to the email address above a few days ago, no response (yet), hence the post here.

Moderator

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200 Messages

 I am so sorry to hear you are not satisfied with your service. Please DM us your complete name and address so we can assist you.

Esteemed Contributor III

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3.5K Messages

Did you want to troubleshoot with the forum? If so, can you give some data on your network and the problem?

New Contributor

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7 Messages

Hi Doris, I just sent another email (first one never responded to, sent 2/15) that now includes screenshots of the modem signal levels both at night when I'm getting full speed, and during the day when it's down to 10 mbps - the numbers are virtually identical. Hopefully someone will see that email and provide some assistance this time. This is getting frustrating and tech support is virtually no help on the phone because they just refer to their script and want me to power cycle everything a zillion times - don't seemed to be trained enough to solve any actual problems that power cycling won't fix.

Esteemed Contributor III

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3.5K Messages

Could this be congestion from too many people using the internet at that time? And the fact you're using an older DOCSIS 3.0 modem. What model modem do you have . Can you show the signal levels from 192.168.100.1?

New Contributor

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7 Messages

The modem is 3.1. It’s fine. Works great 12 hours a day. This is super frustrating. 

Esteemed Contributor III

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3.5K Messages

What model modem? Can you post your signal levels? Both when the problem is happening and when it's not. I can give instructions once I know what model you have.

As for it being a provisioning problem, I doubt it. That would bottleneck the speed all the time. Not just sometimes.

New Contributor

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7 Messages

Nah that's not it. During the day my wife is working and she's the only one eating any bandwidth at all, and it's super minimal (email, web stuff mostly). Modem is an Arris SB8200. I just sent screenshots of the signal levels to cox.help@cox.com.

Honored Contributor

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2.1K Messages

Congestion could be caused by excessive traffic on your node, not just your dropline.  What your neighbors are doing can affect you.

New Contributor

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7 Messages

Well aware of that, but I'm in a rural location with a total of 7 houses on our entire street. Someone would have to be consuming an insane amount of bandwidth, and only for 12 hours daily, to be causing this. Tomorrow a tech will be out and hopefully he'll be able to figure out what's going on. I'll update the thread with progress/resolution.

New Contributor

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2 Messages

Exact same thing is happening to me. I am running into a weekly issue where my 500 mbps internet goes down to <15 mbps. I've already talked to tech support two different times and they assured me that it wouldn't happen again after they restarted my modem.

New Contributor

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7 Messages

WELL it looks like this is finally resolved. I'll elaborate in hopes that it saves someone else a headache later on.

Tech came out, still only getting 10 mbps downstream. He runs a ton of tests outside, everything looks fine. Finally he brings his laptop in, and connects it directly to my modem, and gets full proper speed via ethernet. Connects to a LAN port on my router (TP Link Deco XE75) and gets the crappy speed. SO - the problem is isolated to my router. Which doesn't explain the 0645-1845 timing thing detailed in my first post, but clearly whatever is going on is a router issue. Right?

He leaves, I order a new router, after first attempting to install a previous version of the firmware for the router, no luck. But - full speed suddenly starts happening that evening, a few hours after he left, during the timeframe it would have been throttled previously. Weird. So I do nothing and it's fine, for about a week. Then I start getting 100 mbps instead of 1 gig (I had upgraded to 1g from 500 mbps in the middle of this). Reboot the router, back to full speed. A few hours later, back down to 100 mbps. Now rebooting or power cycling it do nothing, still slow. I decide it's time to replace the flaky router for sure.

Then I'm going through the router's app and see a buried message that there's an issue with my WAN port speed, and that perhaps the patch cable can't support 1g speeds. When the tech was here we actually changed that cable to no effect. I had a brand new one lying around so I swapped it. Boom, full speed again, no more error message about the WAN port. The new patch cable is CAT6. The old one was 5E. Hmm. CAT5 is only certified to 100 mbps. 5E is not an "official designation" but is supposed to be better. CAT6 is rated to handle 10 gbps at < 121 feet. Ah, massive improvement.

This seems to be the final solution, and my presumption is that it was a patch cable issue the entire time. The only weird thing about that theory is why was it working fine for the same 12 hours every day, then throttling down to 1/10th speed the other 12? That remains a mystery. All I care is that all is well now.

Thanks to everyone who responded, and thanks to the excellent Cox peeps that responded to my email and helped me get the tech scheduled, which is a NIGHTMARE to attempt to do via phone support. And thanks to the tech himself, he was awesome.