8% of a 2gig plan every night
For the last 12 months every month or month and half my internet speed drops down to a fraction of my plans speed between 6pm and 11pm at 11pm it start getting faster. I have had technicians out here...
Forum Discussion
I would suggest calling in and asking for customer advocacy group or even filing an FCC complaint but since Cox was just bought things are probably crazy right now in the back rooms of Cox. Like they're not going to care about an FCC complaint when there probably not going to exist in a few months. I don't think you're being throttled. What the technician told you is very likely in common not only at Cox but for the cable internet industry in general. Cable is copper and copper is electrically conductive. Any tear in the sheathing around that copper and it becomes like an antenna. This causes what is called ingress or bad signal leaking into the good signal used by Cox to deliver service over the coaxial. Like hearing noise on a radio station. It can be very hard and time consuming to track the exact source of the problem. You can't stop the signal so you have to find the leak. What speeds do you get exactly? Why do you even you need that speed to begin with? You're not going to see any difference in streaming a video between 50 megabits and 2gbps. Even downloads won't usually saturate a 2 gigabit line because there are not many servers that can handle that speed. To manage that kind of speed to a lot of people is very hard. Only large websites of billion dollar companies can do it and even then if the internet in between them and you is slow, it doesn't matter what they do. So overall, since you're not getting what you pay for and it would be really hard to get them to fix it, I suggest just downgrading since you probably don't even need to be paying that much anyway. Then wait for the company transfer to happen. See how customer support works now. Thank you since it won't be outsourced. See how the new modem that they might give you for free will work any better. You will need your own router, but that's probably a blessing in disguise. If after all the chains you still have issues, then you might want to see if there are any fiber providers in your area. Fiber is much better than cable because fiber uses light which goes over glass or plastic which isn't electrically conductive so physically can't get ingress. It's also faster and better for other reasons too.
Sorry for the bad spelling and grammar. Hurt my back during lawn work so I've been posting more in bed via text to speech over phone. And I can't really even go back and edit because I have cuts of my fingers too. So it's having a hard time registering touch detection accurately. Hope you understood Generally what I was saying though.
I typically get 1.8g-2.3g up until 6pm. That trime hit and I lose over 90% of my connection speed. I also hear you about speed and going with a smaller package. I've no cable TV we stream everything and also game. Which has been abysmal for the last year going back and forth with this problem. i believed the technician. He found it and could see exactly what i was talking about. I wont get into specifics here but the Technician wa nice and educated me in similar fashion to how you have, also told me a work order for that specific troubleshooting and tracing would need to placed, the last time it took them about a week to fix it and they were very helpful and communicated with me asking if I could see a difference which i did for 2 months, now we are back to the same problem. Your grammar was fine and i appreciate you taking time to respond. As you can imagine I'm a bit frustrated now with this service and have been very understanding as I have a technical background as well.
Hunting ingress is a lot like that scene in caddyshack where the guy is trying to kill the Gopher. Sometimes you get out there and the ingress isn't happening so you have nothing to track to find the leak. Other times you find what you think is the week and you plug the hole only to find out either that wasn't the whole that was leaking or there were other holes too. Or sometimes the hole that you plug would just come unplugged. But what really happens is that the technician will track the problem to someone's house. Put a filter on their line to stop the line from their house back feeding into the Cox system but won't put the door hanger on and whose job isn't to deal with customers so the customer has no idea why their internet stop is working. This causes them to call up and of course the tier 1 rep you talk to has no idea that the maintenance tech was out there to fix in ingress problem. So they just schedule a technician. Don't always talk or know about what the maintenance engineers are doing so they just think someone put a filter on by accident and take it off as an easy fix. Internet works again. Problem is solved. Except not only are you unplugging the hole and causing the whole process to repeat, but the next maintenance technician that's assigned to track down the ingress problem might not be the same person So they have to reinvent the wheel tracking the problem all the way back to that person's house. This can go on literally for years. With different customers, reporting the issue and different technicians and engineers. Trying to play whack-a-mole and stepping on each other's toes. I would say it's a Cox problem but I see it more as a problem in the industry as a whole. Front of house does not like to talk with back of house and vice versa.
Could this be solved by tagging the line with a code? Then that code is referenced by the next tech and they say OH this is here for a reason and leave it there?
I think part of the problem is the maintenance techs are in-house but the customer facing techs are usually not. So they use or access different systems. Show a tag in one system. Probably wouldn't be seen in another by another tech. That's why one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing sometimes. But there's also the issue where front of house doesn't like to talk to back of house. That's more of a general problem though than the cause of this specific problem. I don't think the problem is going to be solved because the isps don't really want it to be fully solved. They benefit from some plausible deniability between the two departments. It's similar to the relationship between a cook and waitress or a doctor and nurse.
