Network congestion on Cox (How to fix your problems)

So for those of you having issues, it looks like tons of others have been having the same problems.  Most of the posts on these forums are what looks to be the result of a similar issue.  I can't speak for all of them but I'm willing to bet the answer you're looking for is probably in this post.

Problem: You test your internet speed and it looks reasonable but your internet feels like garbage when skyping/gaming/etc..

Investigating your problem:

You can do this through the command prompt by typing in "tracert www.google.com"  This command will send out packets and request return packets from each node along the way.  The problem with this is that it only sends out one instance of packets and returns.  So you really only get a snapshot of what's happening.  Everything will probably look good and Cox will also claim it's fine. While taking a picture is ok for an instance, what you really need is a series of pictures to see the problem.  The easiest way to investigate your problem is to download Pingplotter or some other tool that allows you to send packets out and request them back from the nodes.  Pingplotter essentially trace routes over and over again until you tell it to stop and graphs the results.

Pingplotter provides a movie of what's happening at each specific node along the way to create a good picture of whats happening.  Some of these nodes are owned by Cox, others may be owned by Google or networking companies etc..

I've provided screenshots of what's happening below on my network.  Each node has a graph associated with it to show over time what's happening.  Below, this shows my network is taking 9 hops to get to www.google.com.  Hops 2 and 3 are sketchy as they are highlighted in the yellow 2 and 3.  The remaining hops look reasonable and fall within that green range.  Also note, there is 2 graphs on the bottom.  The top graph red line is jitter.  The bottom graph is a graph of the latency.

When you dig into hops 2 and 3 you get a different story. Hop 2 is usually the node outside your house.  It's owned and maintained by Cox. My hop 2 is where the problems begin.  You can see major 50ms-120ms of jitter on the small upper graph. 35ms jitter is marked as the dash line for a max reasonable amount. Cox is well beyond reasonable. 

Digging into Hop 3, you can see a similar problem carried over from hop 2. Hop 3 looks pretty much the same as hop 2.  Hop 3 is also owned by Cox and it's probably an area where data is sent to a more centralized location to be sent out.

One thing to notice is that when the jitter is high on the top graph, you see major spiking in latency on the bottom graph.

What is jitter???  Jitter is the variation in the time between data packets arriving, caused by network congestion, or route changes.

So the cause of my problem is pretty much network congestion at nodes 2 and 3.  I think it's mainly at node 2 and it's being carried over to node 3.

For those of you having issues, i would suggest checking your internet this way.  If your having the same problems, I would contact the FCC and/or renegotiate your internet with Cox.  This problem will never get fixed until Cox decides to upgrade the nodes outside your house.  It could be months or even years until these problems are fixed.  They may never fix them if enough people don't complain.

I called in multiple times.  I upgraded my internet to from 50mb/s to 500mb/s and the problem is so bad the upgrade was useless.