Cox techs came by the house and found that a neighbor's cable was introducing some noise into ours, so they added a filter to their cable and mine may have improved somewhat. I still get long pauses on my work VPN indicating a possible timeout, but I do not seem to be dropping the connection as much.
Connection speed still varies from 70 - 130Mb/s, but connection stability is more important. You can still stream HD at lower data rates (70Mb/s is more than enough for several devices), but if you drop the connection you will definitely notice and be frustrated. Same for gaming: an immediate response (ping) is more important than data rates - you can have all the bandwidth you want but if your ping is slow you can not game.
I am not convinced my problem is gone, but maybe yours is the same - you could ask Cox to visit the house and check for noise on the connections. They can not come inside your house to measure signal levels though.
