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!
DVR not working; cnF9 error
My DVR box (Cisco 8742HDC) stopped working around 1230 PM. I checked the cables (use a splitter with my panoramic wifi modem) and tried to reset it from the COX website, but received the "unable to reset receiver, try again in a few minutes" message. I tried again about ten minutes later, no change. I unplugged the power source from the box, waited two minutes then plugged it back in. It cycled through to the "Welcome to COX" screen but never actually made it to the program guide. After trying this a third time, my areahad a thunderstormwhich caused apower outage for about an hour. Once it returned, the box went through the usual boot up process, but now is frozen with the "Welcome to COX. We're loading the Interactive Program Guide" screen and the front of the box reads the "cnF9" error code(or config as I have seen in other posts). It has been like this for the past2 hours and still has not returned. Every once in a while the "Please wait" blue dots that form a circle will move, as if to show progress. I have had this box about four months after having the previousmodel for four years. That box "died" after having a similar issue where it would not record and then it froze on the DVR recordings screen. I lost all my recordings that time and am mentally prepared to lose the recordings on this DVR again. Is it time for another box?
