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Cox has an absolute monopoly in my area (Chesapeake, Virginia) on cable internet. The next best thing is Verizon with DSL, and there's absolutely no fiber optic here, of course.
We've had Cox for several years, with absolute *constant* issues. Scummy practices like giving us free upgrades that made our internet worse, I've watched our internet go from unlimited to capped at 1TB on the same payment plan, and absolutely terrible customer service.
The latest of my complaints is that due to how extremely turbulent the service in my area is from Cox, I had to upgrade to Gigabit internet. I livestream and work from home, so I need solid internet 24/7.
Despite the upgrade, for months now, Cox will just drop off for hours at a time (upstream measured in Kbps), days at a time, whatever it wants. There's no pattern, it's not a specific time of day, it's not a certain weather condition. I had a technician come out and say that there was a problem at the pole, which is extremely vague and was not specified any further.
He said that there would be people coming to fix it in the coming days, no one came in my observation.
Their customer service is so absolutely terrible that every time my internet cuts out I'd rather suffer through it and get no work done until its over, rather than talk to them. It takes literal hours to even get to the point in conversation where they send someone out. Every time I initiate a new conversation they tell me to test my modem, test this, test that. Everything has been tested. A dozen times.
Do I file an FCC complaint? Are there things that can be tested and done on my end that aren't super blatantly obvious? I'm looking for a permanent solution to my terribly turbulent internet.
I noticed some of the people responding here seemed to actually know what they're talking about, as opposed to customer service. Hope so.
Suggestions would be massively appreciated.
Once again, I got about 3 days of internet being mostly pretty decent (still a lot of downtime for what I'm paying for) and my internet is back to packet loss and crappy speeds.
This is my job. What do I need to do?
Let me be very, very clear. This issue has existed all throughout 2018, '19, and '20. It has since worsened in 2020, before covid even started.
I understand covid is pushing my area's utilization, but covid is hardly the first time this has happened. I understand and do expect some ups and downs in internet speed depending on the hour of day of the week, this happens.
But quite often my internet download and upload speeds will drop to 0.1% of the speeds I am paying for. With significant packet loss.
While I admit this is a tangent, was you downgrading from unlimited to a terabyte because of Covid, too? You then turned around a couple years later and recently raised the cap to 1.25 terabytes, marketing it as a pro-consumer move. lol.
I pay for Gigablast, occasionally (when the blue moon eclipses) actually reaching the download speed advertised of a gigabit internet download speed. This means that downloading files at the advertised speeds of your own internet, I would hit my data cap in 2 1/2 hours.
An entire month's worth of data. In 2 1/2 hours.
Once again, I will end summarizing my current upload speed...... 510Kbps! Thank you Cox Communications, very cool.
Currently at under 500kbps, 50-80% packet loss!
I am having the same issues. The upload speed is very inconsistent. Cox had a technician come out a few months ago (after having to almost beg them). The Tech said that my gigablast coming into my home was spotty and had to "turn it down a little to get it stable". was told they would turn it back up after everyone started going back to work. WTH. I pay for it, but you throttle it. My upload speeds still dont work right. this morning is fine right now, but when my daughter cant even do a Zoom call for school (just audio) without getting booted, its ridiculous.
AMEN!!!!!!!!!!! You think they would reach out to help but yet we have to come on a internet forum for our ISP to get answers and have a voice. disgusting.