Finally ping & packet loss improvement in San Diego area

Area: San Diego, El Cajon/Santee.

Even before COVID my ping jitter and packet loss had already been steadily getting worse over the course of a year or so. I keep track of it 24/7 using smokeping. During this past year of working from home it had gotten much worse and more recently degraded to the point where my work was impacted (dropped teleconferences, VPN and VNC sessions disconnecting etc). 

Back in December of 2020, Cox hung a flyer on my door that they were working on improvements and needed to shut off my internet access during one day as they were working on it. That didn't immediately improve things, but in the next few weeks I noticed a few times where my modem was apparently being worked on in the middle of the night, with internet access disconnected for 20 minutes at a time right after midnight. 

Then suddenly on January 7th things improved dramatically and now my ping jitter and packet loss is better than it's frankly been in years. It's been a frustrating time but it does appear that improvements are definitely being made, although never as fast as we would like of course. 😬