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SnpynAZ's avatar
SnpynAZ
New Contributor III
5 years ago

High saturation node, slow internet speeds, intermittent drops and nothing they can do?

I'm hoping to get some additional assistance for our internet woes.

We contacted Cox on April 15th because we experienced an outage with our internet service. This outage was longer than we had been experience for the last month or so so it was time to call. We were greeted with a recording indicating Cox was working on some upgrades in our area and that users might experience intermittent outages between midnight and 6am. We chalked it up to their maintenance window and let it go for the evening.

The next day we noticed we were experiencing slower than normal internet speeds, in our case, less than half of our potential 150Mbps download speed. We did some internal troubleshooting, resetting our router, re-provisioning our cable modem through the automated system, factory resetting our cable modem and eliminated the router altogether, going straight from computer to cable modem for testing. All tests are done using hardwire, either through a router or directly from the cable modem. WIFI was not used during any of this testing. A majority of the responses were the same, download speeds generally ranged between 70-90Mbps from early afternoon into late evenings. There were sporadic results that showed closer to "normal download levels around 110-130Mbps but those were not consistent; we saw many more of the abnormal download speed results than "normal" ones. An appointment was eventually made for a technician to come out and take a look at everything on the outside of the home on 4/20.

We received a call from a technician the morning of 4/18 about our service call. The technician indicated he was looking at the node we're attached to and said it was over 80% saturated and that slows speeds and drop outs were somewhat expected given the high level of saturation. The technician indicated he looked at everything and everything looked good, levels were good and there was really nothing he would be able to do about the situation and cancelled our service call for 4/20.

A number of days later, our connection appears to be getting worse, with speeds generally ranging in the 60-80Mbps range in the early afternoon through late evening. Again, we still have some results in the 100-120Mbps range but those are far fewer than the 60-80Mbps range. We're also experiencing more drop outs (loss of connection lasting 5-15 seconds) and increased frustration.

We understand download speeds are an "up to" but we're generally not getting anything close during the waking hours. Is there anything else we can do to address these issues in the short term? We have been forced, like many others, to work remote and our ability to provide support has been impacted with these connectivity related issues.

Here are some recent examples of speed tests using Cox's speed test portal:

PING: 11ms

JITTER: 5ms

DOWNLOAD: 65.8 Mbps

UPLOAD: 10.0 Mbps

 

PING: 20ms

JITTER: 96ms

DOWNLOAD: 66.8 Mbps

UPLOAD: 9.9 Mbps

 

PING: 11ms

JITTER: 2ms

DOWNLOAD: 62.3 Mbps

UPLOAD: 10.1 Mbps

 

PING: 10ms

JITTER: 4ms

DOWNLOAD: 73.2 Mbps

UPLOAD: 10.2 Mbps

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