Read the forum guidelines
I would sure appreciate some guidance here. I try to keep up but I can get over my head pretty quickly so please bear with me. My problem is that, for well over a year, I have been paying Cox for Gigabit internet and Complete Care, but my system performance never really got close to that. It has gotten progressively worse and now it is almost unusable from my wireless devices. The ethernet connected desktop is usable but only tests at about 250mbps.
The symptoms are that pages can take 15 seconds to load and sometimes not at all and when streaming I get some minor buffering. The wife and I are retired and stream tv in the evenings but other than that it’s pretty much just checking email and Facebook. These problems occur on our Chromebooks, laptops, and iPads.
I use Cox only for internet. My modem is now an Arris SB8200. My Wi-Fi is Google Mesh with five pucks to cover our house which is under 1900 sq ft. My desktop is a Lenovo connected to the Google Mesh via ethernet. Speed test results (speedtest.net) are pretty consistent:
Last week I finally called Cox Complete Care. I had to run through the story with four different agents. Each time I had to start from the beginning and comply with their instructions as they worked through their obligatory scripts. A warm transfer sure would have been nice. In the end they agreed to send out a tech. The tech was out the next day and did the following:
Following his visit I read through several forums and decided to replace my Motorola MB 8600 with the Arris SB 8200. I had been seeing huge numbers of corrected and uncorrectable errors on a few channels and thought it was worth a shot. The Arris has provided the same results as the Motorola. I’ve also noticed that the SB8200 front panel lights indicate that both up and down are blue, I believe indicating that the connection is not allowing connection to DOCSIS 3.1. The event log was also showing a lot of Dynamic Range Window Violations but I performed a hard reset on the modem this morning so most were wiped away. I’ve attached a file containing the Connection Status which I just took. It too was wiped clean with the hard reset this morning but maybe something will give a clue.
Thanks in advance for any help you might have!!!
The status listed show the connection state of the cable modem. They are used by your service provider to evaluate the operation of the cable modem.
Current System Time: Mon Mar 6 15:01:22 2023
Sorry for the delay but I wanted to follow up with an update on what I've done. In review: I have Cox gigablast service as well as their Complete Care Support Package. For a very long time I've put up with extremely slow speeds but finally called them and they sent a tech out. He claimed the coax running into my house was bad and replaced it. He showed me on his guage that he was getting 950mbps into my modem and about 900gbps out. But when I ran the speed test on my Lenovo desktop connected via ethernet directly to the modem and ran speedtest.com I got only about 250. When I connected my Google Mesh router, the Google Home app reported it was seeing 850gbps in but the four other points are only seeing about 30 to 50 and speedtest on my wireless devices reflect similar results. The desktop connected via ethernet Cat 7 flat cable reports the same 250 whether connected directly to the modem or to the Google router. The Complete Care tech watched all of this... shrugged and said there must be something wrong with my equipment.
Since my OP, I completely took apart my network and added back each device one at a time performing speed tests on each as I did. I got the same results. No improvement.
Then I read that sometimes a Ring alarm system or doorbell can gum things up so I unplugged my system and restarted each device on the network one at a time with a speed test on each. No improvement.
I have now signed up for the TMobile 5G home internet trial. I just received my device and have only had time to play with it for a few minutes. and then only with one wireless device. Mixed results. I'll play with it a bit more soon but I'm not optimistic about anthing anymore.
My next step is going to be to set up an appointment with a local home networking repair shop which has a pretty good reputation in our small town. He holds degrees in both EE and CS. I just want to do business with a company that will "fix their customer" rather than simply trying to prove that the customer's problem is not their fault. I know what a slippery slide that can be for a business but the fact is that I'm paying Cox for their top tier service and their top tier support and yet I have to wait 15 seconds for a Facebook photo to load and they offer me no suggestion on how to proceed.
I'm always open for additional ideas but will also post the results of my experience with both TMobile and the local repair shop.
Thanks guys!
Connect the desktop direct to the modem with a cat5E cable, and reboot into safe mode with networking and run the speed test. Believe it or not, first, I have seen speeds degrade using cat 7 cable, and second, I see computer speeds degrade because of background software, Booting into safe mode with networking will eliminate that possibility. When I was at Cox, we used to do that all the time with customers, and one time when they were getting 140 or so, booting into safe mode with networking, jumped to 925, booted into normal modem back to the 140's.
Wow. Thanks, I'll give it a try.
let me know how it turns out!