ContributionsMost RecentMost LikesSolutionsCutting Email Functions but not PRICE!!! COX has removed these features from their email service WITHOUT compensating for reduced services (including ones for TV service): COX does not recognize logging in, sending email, deleting messages etc as "activity" on your email account UNLESS YOU USE THE WEBMAIL INTERFACE!!! (f'ing STUPID!) If you don't use the webmail interface frequently enough they will first deactivate then delete your account THAT YOU ARE PAYING FOR AS PART OF YOUR ISP SERVICE! WTF!!!! COX no longer allows sending email from the COMPOSE tab of the WEBMAIL interface. It runs the send progress bar to 10% then tells you there was a server problem. COX no longer hosts email interface for support issues such as this. Your only resource is to endure ridiculous holds to get a tech who blames it all on you, your hardware, your software and refuses to do anything unless you schedule a "home visit" (at over $150 a pop) for a tech to "fix" the problem. NOTE: in 40 years of service, NOT ONCE HAS A TECH THAT COX SENT OUT ACTUALLY DIAGNOSED AND FIXED A PROBLEM!! TV or Internet the routine is the same: cut off, change a connector or two, perhaps replace a short cable from a wall outlet, tell you if that doesn't fix the problem then you need to "upgrade" your TV / router/modem/in-wall cabling..... SolvedCOX Rated WORST - No surprise there. Consumer Reports released the results of their survey of telecommunication services. No surprise that COX is in the WORST category no matter whether you look at the "Phne TV Internet Bundles", "Internet Providers", "TV Services" categories. In the "Value" category COX is always the lowest score, and in "Customer Service", the second lowest score possible. Where "reliability" was a rating factor, COX scored the median or "average" value. Same with "speed". Why can a company with record (and increasing) profits sustain such growth with mediocre to poor services? UNREGULATED GOVERNMENT GRANTED MONOPOLIES! As in CA where COX hip-pocket politicians in the state legislature approved a carve up of the state into monopoly zones for telecom services among COX, COMCAST and XFINITY. This allowed COX for the longest time to keep its hip-pocket county commisioners from issuing construction permits to Verizon (local landline phone provider) to update their copper line to fiber which caused Verizon to abandon their services in my area to Frontier, a Chinese company that, because of Chinese law, has to make all communications on its networks available to Chinese military and industrial "intelligence" services without any type of legal review or check and balance. Why the Chinese interest in this area? It is fairly dense with high-tech companies with leading edge tech in medical, aerospace, military and civilian telecom, power generation and distribution technologies, the very areas Chinese spying has been penetrating and stealing for decades. FINALLY (probably due to anti-American Trumpists in the telecom regulating agencies from Fed to state level) Frontier was able to break the COX stranglehold on the permitting process and has just started to upgrade the local copper network to fiber, and in limited neighborhoods, offer high-speed internet via fiber. COX current response in an advertising campaign specifically calling out Frontier on speed based on their historical DSL service in order to be sure no one notices that they are transitioning to Fiber. In addition COX falsely claims a 99%+ up-time/reliability that I have not experienced EVER in Cox internet service, and in their TV service since the early 2000's. To bleed as much money out of existing customers before they discover there may be a more reliable and cost-effective option, COX has increased its customer abuse tactics. For example, charging for streaming services that are only available with a DVR-enable Cox receiver, while they KNOW you are only provisioned with (and charged for) non-DVR capable receiver (and stating when, called on the fact that their Web site says YOUR receiver IS capable of receiving the streaming service - i.e. HBOMax - that you need to upgrade to the DVR capable box at an addition $10 - 15 per month in order to use the service you are being billed for!). Another example: Initially signed up for the lowest internet speed package (at the time 100 mbps) when Verizon disabled my DSL by wiring in a new office complex between my home office and the switch so that the wire run to my house put me outside the DSL capable distance for their copper network. Subsequently I got (and saved) emails from COX telling me how I was getting a "free speed upgrade" to my existing internet service. Of course, these never appeared - at least not according to Ookla Speed Test. What did appear over time was a doubling then tripling of the "Ping" time over my DSL service which I believe is COX's interception of internet/website requests for purposes of privacy violating profiling and corporate throttling "for fun and profit" from data miners and corporations that want "priority" access to COX users. Then to rub salt into thw wounds, COX eliminated the 100 and 150 Mbps tiers, automatically "upgraded" those users to 250 mbps with an overall 40%+ fee increase, BUT NEVER UPGRADED THE ACTUAL SPEED OF THE CONNECTION!!! When contacted, they tried to tell my wife (take advantage of an ignorant woman, they thought - except she shares the same software engineering creds as I have) that in order to get these new speeds we would have to upgrade our equipment to COX "panoramic" (mesh) WiFi, which is total BS especially for a home with one computer wired to the router, and one light-use tablet connected to the internet VERY SPORADICALLY throughout any given day. (No social media accounts, little to no looking at videos, mostly email, some shopping, and some info research for non-digital hobbies.) When challenged, the excuse became, "well your modem is too old - you need to upgrade it". I've been using my own Netgear DOCSIS 3.0 modem since the beginning with COX, and the only problem is their frequent outages that sometimes the own up to as "maintenance" and other times as "outage in your area" always with the same predicted fix time of 6:00 am the next day. Despite knowing this was total BS on COX's part, I went to their web site and found a modem they claimed was DOCSIS 3.1 and compatible with their service. I purchased the modem from BestBuy, but when following the modem manufacturer's instructions for COX activation via COX web site, it failed (waited on activation to complete for several hours and gave up). I then called COX tech support number listed for Internet service activation, provided the tech with the MAC etc. and while waiting for the activation which he could not do, he tried to set up a "service call" by a tech with a replacement modem since the one I had could not be activated (despite all status indicators being normal). I told him that the modem was purchased from BestBuy and then he told me "UNLESS THE MODEM IS SUPPLIED BY COX IT WILL NOT WORK WITH COX INTERNET SERVICE". So, once again COX web site falsely advertises available services for specific hardware models! AND THEY GET AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE THEY ARE AN UNREGULATED MONOPOLY TELECOM PROVIDER!! AND THE KNOWINGLY CONTINUE TO MAKE FALSE CLAIMS AND "SERVICE ADJUSTMENTS" SOLELY TO INCREASE PROFITS WITHOUT IMPROVEMENTS TO QUALITY, QUANTITY OF SERVICE OR "CUSTOMER CARE". That's why, when talking to anyone about my telecom services I say, "COX - say it out loud - that's what you have to deal with - a bunch of....! Re: Motorola MB8611 Problem Same problem except that the Cox tech's attempts also timed out. Returning the modem is not an option due to the assinine CA law that FORCES you to reset the password before you can log into the modem's status page. So once you sign in to that page, you have permanently "damaged" the modem and it's return is not accepted. Regarding the Zoom thing - bogus distraction. The modem is listed on Motorola site, is listed in Cox's "compatible" modems. If you have had an existing modem attached before attempting the new modem installation, you don't have to activate it again. just connect to the cable outlet and power it up (which is how I am able to make this post after 6 hours of trying to get the MB8611 activated). I have screen shots of the computer event log, the modem event log and the COX activation fail screens (different results on different attempts). You DO NOT want Cox to send a tech because they will just disconnect / reconnect cables, turn things off and on, tell you it is your hardware that is the issue and leave you with $150+ service charge. (Been there, done that.) The tech also told me when she suggested swapping at the local office and I said I got it at BestBuy that, "oh- all those modems from Amazon and BestBuy don't work. You need to lease one from us (COX) in order for it to work. TOTAL BS as my old DOCSIS 3.0 Netgear works just fine. Except that it is Cox's excuse as to why they only provide half the speed they bill me for. "You need a new modem". This after they double my Internet fee by eliminating the 150 mbps level and force you to go to 250 mbps or back to basic dial-up speeds AT STILL MORE THAN I PAID FOR 150 mbps. I think COX activation looks for some unique "got it from Cox" code in the firmware and just won't activate if they don't think they got or are getting money from you for the modem. "COX" - say it out loud! Perfect description. Re: Cox Throttling Down Internet Connections Again? It also appears that part of the problem is pass-through from COX DNS servers of DoS attacks. (From my router log: [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.131.151, port 16187, Monday, January 31,2022 15:52:29 [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.128.54, port 1121, Monday, January 31,2022 15:40:17 [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.130.47, port 25736, Monday, January 31,2022 15:25:31 [DoS Attack: ACK Scan] from source: 45.61.142.182, port 10668, Monday, January 31,2022 14:41:49 ) I don't understand why my lowly router can detect and reject these attacks yet your DNS servers cannot? Result: multiple "Server unavailable. Try Again" responses to attempts to retrieve email, connect to a web page (NOT connected with the sources of the attacks from IPs listed above or their servers) or view HTML email that may include graphics / links from the Web. Cox Pass-through of DoS attacks? Connecting to a web page often requires two or three attempts. HTML email often doesn't render without going back and forth between them several times. When this is occurring I found the following (or similar) in the router log: [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.131.151, port 16187, Monday, January 31,2022 15:52:29 [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.128.54, port 1121, Monday, January 31,2022 15:40:17 [DoS Attack: RST Scan] from source: 45.232.130.47, port 25736, Monday, January 31,2022 15:25:31 [DoS Attack: ACK Scan] from source: 45.61.142.182, port 10668, Monday, January 31,2022 14:41:49 In this particular instance, the first three IPs trace to cert.br / registgro.br, servers that refuse to expose all the IPs they control and that appear to be set up for spammers, scammers and dark web use. Therefore COX security should block all communications that originate from IPs belonging to the users of these domains. The latter one was from a server in San Francisco and so COX should be able to prosecute them under state and federal anti-hacking laws. WHY DON"T THEY? After all COX IS scanning all our OUTGOING web traffic so they can throttle-down the responses from competing streaming services and those who don't pay the fare for favorable treatment when routing through COX servers. Seems like they could easily throttle a DOS attack to 0. Cox Throttling Down Internet Connections Again? Suddenly, overnight web pages take forever to load, email messages sent in HTML format take ages to load while Ookla SpeedTest shows no change in Cox ISP speed. This leads to one conclusion - Cox is intercepting, analyzing and categorizing ALL our internet traffic and "throttling" down traffic that is not from Cox "preferred" (i.e. paid to get priority of their traffic) web sites and content sources. Initially ISPs wanted to do this to be able to extort more money from streaming services and / or force users to stick to only their ISP's streaming service. Net Neutrality made that illegal until Trumps FCC commission diddled with the rules and reclassified certain ISP activity ad "not electronic communications that fall under the regulatory power of the FCC" thus negating Net Neutrality without having to change the law. It appeas that Cox is now gotten their full snoop-ware suite up so they can drastically degrade streams of Netflix, Roku, NVidia, AppleTV etc streaming services to force user to use Countour plus exclusively. They appear also to have removed HD channels from the cable in favor of "down-coding" them to a 16:9 aspect ration very low MPEG-2 profile for transmission. It is ridiculous when you can see the macro blocks all the time and have content where certain camera moves overrun the encoder and the picture completely breaks up. Is Countour plus signal (an IP feed supposedly) any better? I don't know because I won't be forced to Countour plus just because Cox has maneuvered itself to unregulated monopoly status in our area. So I think the only logical explanation for the instantaneous degradation in internet service is Cox's insertion of the comm intercept, analyze, categorize and throttling software into the otherwise quick, straightforward IP routing software. No doubt they are also profiling us and selling specific user profiling info to marketing / spamming operators in order to compete with the likes of Google and the other snoopware profiling companies that pollute the internet. Meanwhile, non-streaming users like me pay in annoying wait times for page / email loads that used to be (even in the days of DSL) instantaneous. ALL Cox Channels Have DISAPPEARED!! Turn on the cable box and all you see is COX and five blocks through which a blue block keeps cycling, then an "Info" banner that says the signal is "temporarily unavailable - watch another channel" except ALL the channels say the same thing. Try to reset the cable box and of course COX says, "Outage in you area. We will fix it as soon as we can". But its going into the second day. Off course, being an unregulated government sanctioned monopoly, NO CREDIT FOR DAYS OF LOST SERVICE will be offered AND NO RUSH TO FIX IT WILL BE MADE. Twice in the last two months we were told of a planned outage to upgrade the system so we would have oh, so much better service (even though it is still worse, more unreliable, more intermittent than in the days of analog service in the 80's and 90's). Once by email, it would happen on July 6, they said. WRONG! On July 8, they email to say the wonderful update was done, and oh how lucky we are to NOW have such great reliable service. WRONG - NEVER HAPPENED! Then by door hanger on July 27. WRONG - NEVER HAPPENED! So is this >24 hour outage supposed to be the 6-hour outage that never happened? I doubt it! IT IS JUST A CONTINUED ABUSE OF CUSTOMERS SUBJECTED TO A GOVERNMENT GRANTED TV AND INTERNET MONOPOLY IN AN AREA WHERE THERE IS NO OTA CAPABILITY, AND COX HAS "CONVINCED" LOCAL OFFICIALS TO DENY PERMITS FOR COMPETITORS WHO WANTED TO RUN FIBRE-OPTIC FOR COMPETING SERVICES. "COX" - say it out loud - its all in the name. Re: Cox Degrades Signals and Prohibits Cable Box Resets No YOU CANNOT! Cox either says "Cable outage in your area - estimated repair time, 12 hours." OR After 10 minutes of no reset posts to the web page "There was a problem. We were unable to reset your cable box". OR "You have reset your cable box too often please contact support" where they send you to a inoperative AI, "Oliver". Translation: We got your money so FU! We know we haven't upgraded our infrastruction since 1980 and it is ovreloaded. But HEY - we have a government monopoly for TV, Internet, and VOIP services in your area with no regulatory oversight so we are going to abuse the dickens out of your until you DIE! Cox Degrades Signals and Prohibits Cable Box Resets As soon as Cox went from analog to digital the degradation of reception has steadily gotten worse while they continue to up prices by 8 - 12% per year - supposedly "upgrading" their "infrastructure". SYMPTOMS: Black screen, no audio with a displayable info bar. This went from occasional on one channel to this year multiple channels every night for hours at a time. MPEG macro-blocking with audio drop out. Again initially once in a while, now multiple channels for hours at a time EVERY night. Typically it is 5 sec of audio and video, followed by 30 seconds of macro blocking or picture freeze and no audio repeated for hours on end. Tune to a channel, get 20 - 30 seconds of black before they re-route you to a non-HD channel which takes another 10 seconds to display. The instantaneous freeze with no audio that can only be corrected by switching channels. The usual fix - going to your online account to reset your cable box - still appears in the account. For the past several months they would not allow it after reporting the network was working fine. You select to reset and it denies you saying there IS a network outage they will fix in 12 hours. This past week they simply report "There was a problem and we could not reset your cable box. Try again later" but it NEVER works. I believe they have actually disabled this capability of your account and just won't tell consumers they have done it. Charge you for services they deny you access to. I am being charged for HBO Max, something that should come from my HBO subscription through COX but I can't access it unless I pony up an additional $29 a month for a DVR box. My smart TV would support it through network / internet connection, but I would have to pay HBO directly for it because they say,unlike the old HBO Go I must get it through COX if I want to get it as part of my subscription. They regularly take the entire cable sometimes including internet service offline for hours at a time for "upgrades" which make no changes to the crappy signal quality, bogged down internet connections and glitchiness. Yes, this "improved service" is why our cable bill doubled in 5 years. COX - say it out loud - its all in the name! TV Listings Removed from the Web Why did COX (say it out loud - the name says it all) replace their local TV listings page with a page for sales of streaming products? Why did COX decide it was a good idea to downgrade part of the service I pay ever escalating fees for (even more money every year for fewer channels, poorer quality signals, frequent loss of all services and diffferent channel blocks) by REMOVING LOCAL TV LISTINGS FROM THE WEB. EVERY link to what used to show listings of scheduled shows for all the locally available channels - essentially putting the "Guide" online - have been re-routed to a sales pitch for various streaming upgrades and apps and services. I DON'T WANT STREAMING SERVICE! I WANT TO KNOW IF / WHEN CERTAIN SHOWS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON MY CABLE (OTT) SERVICE! Do they really want me to discontinue Cable TV service for streaming only? If I do it *** SURE won't be with COX (say it out loud - the name says it all).