excessive data use charges
Since the November 2023 billing cycle, I have been hit with ~ $70 of data overage charges each month. Our usage patterns have not varied for the past several years, in fact they actually appear lower...
Forum Discussion
First, I assume you have the Panoramic gateway? If so, have you thought to upgrade to your own router that has bandwidth tracking so you can fact check Cox? You sound technical enough to make use of your own network. Overall, I have seen many posts about recent spikes in the bandwidth meter but so far no conclusions. No one has yet done a direct comparison between their own meter and Cox.
My Wi-Fi router doesn't have a robust log monitor, so other than a basic byte count per day, it doesn't help identify the root cause. My complaint is now really Cox refusing to provide the logs they use to track and claim excessive traffic volume. They told me the logs "track destination, port and protocol to determine categorization", so I thought I was on to something. I can correlate IP address and protocol to a specific service myself, which is all I was asking for. They refused to provide the logs, indicating "privacy policy". When I advised the logs contained my own (nobody else's) information and privacy concerns weren't a valid reason, they didn't have a good answer and again advised me to change the Wi-Fi password on my router. At that point I just gave up on the call.
Maybe I am being petty and making too much of the issue, but it shouldn't be this difficult to get specific details on the information they obviously capture and use to calculate overages. It seems like a "trust us, you really are using that much bandwidth, even if you haven't changed any usage behaviors or device types in the past 24 billing cycles, so just pay without question".
