Continually horrific intermittent Internet service in a Phoenix, AZ suburb for months.
Since October 7th, 2017, I have had miserable service at my home in the Phoenix-area "East Valley." I have had a minimum of 38 (THAT'S THIRTY-EIGHT!) witnessed outages, many called "unplanned outages" by Cox. A few techs have checked and rechecked wiring at my home, have replaced wiring and contacts, have blamed low signal levels and line noise, and despite my many weeks of extraordinary patience, have left me and others in my neighborhood with ratty, miserable Internet intermittencies.
If you call in to Cox to report the outage that Cox "tailors specifically to your needs," you might not get a Cox employee...you could be speaking to a Cox "Business Partner." From my anecdotal experiences, Cox "Business Partners" many times fail to even document your call, so be sure to ask if they are a Cox employee or a subcontractor. Hang up if it's the latter....because if you have a string of outages, Cox will not have an accurate count on the outages and may not believe you.
Do not hesitate to call for a supervisor on the line. Tier one agents are a bit limited in latitude to do certain things, like giving you credits on your account. The biggest problem is that the information flow is unidirectional. You call Cox, report your outage, they log it and wait until others in your area also call in, then and only then will they send a report upstream to the field technician dispatchers. When and if the field technicians deal with the issue, they rarely report to the agent you spoke with or comment on your account as to what caused the outage. I have been driven to the point of near-madness explaining and re-explaining to each and every "new" agent how many outages I've had and how poor the response to correct these ongoing issues have been. I have been in touch THREE TIMES with the Atlanta, GA Cox headquarters discussing with Stacy and Michelle these recurrent outages but they too are limited by the fact that they are at the mercy of a field technician who may or may not document what they found and how they fixed it.
Cox's philosophy when it comes to troubleshooting system intermittencies is very haphazard. Rather then monitor a suspect line leading back to their signal distribution point, they wait until a customer has the outage to begin troubleshooting allover again. Trying to narrow down where in the signal path a problem is when you only monitor the line intermittently is like playing a game of Russian Roulette. I tried to explain that this technique ignores the fact that customers are expecting uninterrupted service and aren't getting it, but customers like me who are already paying big bucks for Unlimited Internet have a right to exhibit less patience and have higher expectations of quality service.
One technician who came to my home indicated that because others on my block were having recurrent problems, that a "neighborhood node" might be having issues. I have asked countless times about what they found out about our neighborhood node, but the telephone agent reports that nothing about it has been documented as far as they could see. So field technicians may or may not be dispatched, and if they are, they don't document what they find or don't find.
I've been a Cox customer for 24 years in the Phoenix valley....and of all of those years of service, this last year has been the absolute worst. Moderators posting to this Forum will respectfully try to help, but they are kept in the dark about what is REALLY going on with faulty equipment in the field. They may not appreciate posts like this, but I just can't lie. When you make contact with Cox headquarters in Atlanta and speak to the upper echelon of Customer Support and still don't get anywhere, you have to conclude that Cox Communications isn't too concerned about a bad customer service reputation. After all, they just started the extortion program on October 1st, 2017, where after you hit 1 Terabyte of transfer, you are billed at $10.00/50 GB or can subscribe to the $50.00/month add on for Unlimited data. I did the latter and my service went right into the toilet.
So what is left to do? The Arizona Corporation Commission advised me to report this continually bad service to my local municipality. I am in the midst of doing that. I don't expect miracles. But if enough of you customers don't get action on your own bad connectivity issues, make sure you let your city government know about it.
Finally, make sure you get comfortable accessing your cable modem's event log file. You may even want to print the daily log out on days when you have dropouts. Save the page as a pdf or print the darn screen out. It seems that the cable modem I have (an Arris SB6190) clears its event logs daily. Your modem will not lie about bad service from Cox. Using your browser, in case of the Arris modem, type in 192.168.100.1 and hit enter. You'll be in your modem's logs. Those records may be your only proof of bad service.
Our society has driven itself to be very dependent upon a functional Internet connection. Many financial institutions expect you to transact business over the Internet. Many of you are streaming live TV over that connection. Many of you have Voice Over IP services that depend on the Internet. Some of you have your alarm systems communicate via VOIP to a central station for your alarm services. Some of you have surveillance systems that depend upon this connectivity. You simply should not have to put up with frequent intermittencies. But I can assure you that in the fine print...in Cox's Terms of Service, Cox waives any responsibility should the Internet go down in the middle of a financial transaction, or simultaneous to an alert of a fire or break-in of your residence, or an important phone conversation. If you lose money or valuable time or data because of Cox's failure to provide the service it advertises, you have absolutely no recourse. And the higher-ups at Cox really appreciate that.
