High Ping & Packet Loss - Confirmed Cox is Throttling
I have had cox for 6 months now, have the 150 down plan. The first 4 months I have zero connectivity problems, zero ping problems, and zero packet loss issues.
Starting exactly two months ago on a Saturday morning I started getting extreme pings while playing games. Every time I had a ping spike in game, my discord would also go red and showed extreme ping and my friends could no longer hear me. These ping spikes affect every application at the same time, so I have already ruled out a specific game server issue. I am also playing on a computer which is connected via Ethernet directly into the router.
Since it first started happening, I have had bad ping spikes every single day and will get significantly worse the later the day goes on. It's gotten so bad that I actually can't play games anymore.
Before the ping issues started, my in game ping was always a consistent 38-40 ping, never any fluctuations. Now the best my ping gets in game is 75-80 ping. With ping spikes every 15-30 seconds to 100-140 ping. When it's later in the night ping will have really bad spikes to 150-200 ping.
I have now had 4 Cox tech guys out to my house and claim their is no issue (BS). I had been using Cox's panoramic router/modem combo and they even replaced it twice. Still didn't fix the issue, so then I bought my own modem and router (Netgear CM1200 modem, RAX80 router) and still have the same packet loss issue.
So I downloaded pingplotter and let it run for hours. It shows I constantly have packet loss and at times extreme packet loss. It starts at hop 1 when testing directly through modem and hop 2 when testing Ethernet directly to router.
After another day of major packet loss I started doing more research. I have come across hundreds, if not thousands, of other Cox users having my exact problem just within the last year alone, this is a widespread issue.
I now believe this is a form of traffic throttling by Cox and there is nothing you can do but switch ISP.
See this explanation below:
When you connect to the Internet, your traffic travels through your Internet service provider’s network before it leaves your ISP’s network and travels over another provider’s network. ISPs may sometimes degrade performance at these interconnection points unless the other provider pays an additional toll to the ISP.
The Internet Health Test by Battle for the Net checks your Internet connection to see if there are problems at “interconnection points”. By checking a number of different routes, the tool will detect whether you’re experiencing degraded performance at one or more interconnection points.
The tool performances a number of different speed tests across different networks. If all of them are fast, you’re not experiencing this problem.
My results from this test: Speed Test Results
Average Speed
13.85 Mbps
I am supposed to get 150 Mbps
