So I had a tech come out, he was awesome. Very detailed and helped troubleshoot more than the last one. He fixed some of the wire crimping that the previous one did and we tried everything again. Previous crimping and connections wasn't so good and he showed me why.
This is VERY strange - He was getting over 900 Mbps down when we tested the connections and my modem on his device. We were able to hook it directly because my connection box internally and modem is close to the outside back door so we were able to use my extended cables so he didn't step inside. We speculated that maybe the inside crimps jobs might be causing issues...but we barely pushed ~250-280 down on my laptop wired to the modem. Why is his device showing over 900 on the modem and my wired laptop was MUCH less? After he left, I tried another test...I avoided the coax that comes into my house and wired one outside in the COX box to their orange wire. This should've been getting 900 Mbps down...BUT NO, ~250 Mbps again. Is it possible that the COX set-up in the demarcation point (there's a metal connection between the COX orange cable and the cable that comes into my house) needs to be replaced?
I really liked the tech, he was detail-oriented and even showed me what he was seeing so I was able to validate his findings. This is a real head-scratcher.
Anyone with similar experiences?
Does your laptop have a Gigabit ethernet adapter?
Yes, and I was using a Cat8 and Cat7 cables to test
Try running Net Adapter Repair AIO to reset your network adapter to it's default settings and see if that fixes it. Sometimes those adapters can get hung up on one particular speed and they never change until you fully reset them. That will reset everything.
