ISP drops, No downstream, No Internet…. why, oh why dear COX do you lie?
How are we supposed to trust you when… - Multiple Cox Representatives, over the phone and via chat, fail to complete account verification - Chat support does not understand the issue as described - Technical support apparently doesn’t know to use their tools and resources - Technical support misdiagnoses the issue, blames the customer, and doesn’t know to look for outages - COX outage information is not accurately reported and does not reflect on outage website - Smart Help self-service troubleshooting also does not report outage information, including from inner notes - Representatives do not know how to check inner notes - Technical support only solutions are 1) Reboot, the problem is on the customer end 2) Replace the modem 3) Charge extra for in person Technician 4) Charge extra to speak with Advanced Technical Support - Technical Support Supervisors argue with the customer in a way that implies the customer is a liar, even with issue being on Cox end - Retention department solution conflicts witheveryone else, including Technical Support Supervisors ISSUE DETAILS: Home ISP went down around 7pm PST last night, in middle of remote work shift. Spent about 6 hours troubleshooting. Couldn’t wait for tech to come last night so purchased new modem. New modem had SAME issue, with no downstream or ISP connection. Reverted setup back to OG and went to bed. Woke up today and everything magically worked. Home network logs show ISP WAN service resumed around 3:30am PST today. Technical support kept saying the issue was with my router and my modem was old (they are still selling same model on shelves btw, it's great! TY Netgear!), even when I had NO router connected, was NOT using Wi-Fi, and was directly ethernet modem connection. All cable connections, including splitter in attic, are solid with no lose or bad anything. No amount of rebooting, restarting, or resetting would fix. Logs indicated packet loss on ISP end and issue was with 2 separate modems (1 was brand new). Oddly during this, both modems did initially connect for 5-10 mins after 1 st reboot and then stopped working. Multiple agents wanted to charge me for having a technician come to home or charge to speak with “advanced support”. Called today to find out what the issue was, what changed, or what triggered the solution so could prevent a next time. Tech agent didn’t understand issue and wanted to troubleshoot an issue I wasn’t having any longer, which was nonsensical. The agent also wanted to charge me for advanced support or to send technician out, which again was nonsensical when I was no longer having an issue. The agent’s supervisor did not listen to issue and kept saying it was an issue with my router or modem. I spoke with retention, who advised me there WAS an outage last night that ended this morning. Those outage details were apparently missed by every other chat and over the phone agents? Really, really ODD. Makes me wonder if retention was blowing smoke or if their Technical Support and Chat groups are really that inadequate. From my experiences, I sadly believe the latter. Work also checks on outages and saw nada. Can’t prove to employer that COX had another outage! At least retention did help with future tech support needs with the Cox Cares support thingy. I appreciate COX not charging me for doing their jobs and supporting their own services...mostly. EFFORTS LOSS: ½ work shift, 6 hours total time last night, 2 hours today, and $300-ish on new modem which needs returning. EFFORTS GAIN: Learned most folks don’t need to pay for the unlimited plans if you keep your data under 1280 gigs a month. Check your data use history and save yourself $50 bucks a month off plan bloat! RESULT: 12/2-12/3 ISP drops – it was them not us! PS. Make sure if you talk to anyone at COX they verify your account. Lots of agents like to skip that step, give account info out, and make changes without it.
7+ years of summer internet issues and packet loss in Sahuarita/85629.
Question(s): Is there a way to request an inspection / audit / health check of the neighborhood infrastructure? Does having IP addresses help narrow down potential locations? Is there a way to better seal or enclose equipment? I never had these issues over 10 years in the PHX area... and it is an objectively harsher environment for electronic survivability. I'm happy to help be part of the solution for myself and my neighbors… just let me know what I can do. However, having a tech come out to my house and start this debug dance for the 7th year in a row is just going to waste everyone's valuable time yet again. History: Entering year 7 of having summer internet issues. Always at or around monsoon season. Every year I am told that it must be my equipment. Every year a tech gets sent out at least once. Usually multiple times. Every year it takes 30-60 days of back and forth to resolve. It has always been cox equipment somewhere in the neighborhood. I work from home, and find this extremely frustrating. Every year I start all over again like bad internet groundhog day… explaining the history, potential issues, and following the same path of a tech at my door measuring MER and BER. It has never been my equipment… marginal improvement in performance gains. If I had any other reasonable option for internet service at my house, I'd have exercised it years ago. Issue: Here we are again… I was hopeful that maybe things would be different this year. However, there was broad outage in the 85629 area on 06/22/22 from around 0900-1200 AZ. After which, outbound packet loss has been intermittent accompanied by low upload speeds. This morning, my upload speeds have been abysmal. 1Mbps up to around 5Mbps. My normal upload speed is consistently ~35Mbps. Along with that, I am seeing significant packet loss. Outbound packet loss has been anywhere from 3-30%. Inbound speeds are moderately lower than normal, and I am not seeing significant inbound packet loss. Troubleshooting: 1. I've rebooted the router and modem multiple times. 2. I'm using hardwired devices, and have swapped between multiple ethernet cables. CAT5e and CAT6 on the off chance it would do anything. (I knew it wouldn't) 3. I've gone through 2 different routers, flashed the firmware of both routers, and gone direct through the modem. 4. I've used multiple computers to ensure the behavior is not limited to a single computer. 5. Still seeing the same results. Pathping: Shows no packet loss between computer and router, or router and modem. In fact, the first problematic node is 10.97.200.1 … I'm guessing the neighborhood switch, or other infrastructure. Followed immediately by 100.127.78.150, and 100.120.100.40. Ping Plotter confirms pathping's results. My neighbor across the street (who I share a tap with) sees the same frequent issues. One of my other neighbors a few blocks over is unaffected. 0% packet loss, and I believe they were unaffected by the outage on 06/22/22. Boosting my outbound power by adding attenuators has historically shown some level of improvement. 8-12dB has been the sweet spot, but isn't making a difference right now. Hypothesis: I'm going take a wild guess, and say that either the Wednesday worksite was not buttoned up properly after work finished, or another area has significant water ingress after recent monsoon rains. As the day has progressed (and the area potentially dries out), upload speeds and packet loss have improved. Twice now, the summer monsoons have flooded repair sites that were not properly sealed up. Occasionally, packrats get into equipment, and cause havoc.
Account and EBB program
SINCE JULY I have had to have multiple days lost from.qork because you cannot connect with the correct people they the number or chat. I am accepted into the ebb program Cox removed it after 3 months and a disconnect several loud conversations with incompetent reps (which is cox fault they are not training their people) hangups . Blood pressure reaching troubling levels finally they fix it and put me back on...but NO just got a call about a disconnect again because THEY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO APPLY BWNWFIT WITHOUT TORTURING THE CUSTOMER... HAVE YOU HEARD THE WORD LAWSUIT...OH NOW IM ALL IN
Cox's Failure to Support Gigablast
First off all I work from home and depend on a stable connection with good bandwidth... When the opportunity came up to upgrade to Gigablast I bought a brand new Arris SB8200 and upgraded my account. From day one I never got full Gigablast speeds even when plugged directly into the modem with my laptop. I even tested with another laptop and a desktop PC and none of them got more than ~650Mbps. I was OK with that though because in my book that was good bandwidth. Starting today I can't get more than 100Mbps at best... multiple tests using the Cox provided Speedtest app and website show download speeds as low as 5Mbps. The connection also drops out all together intermittently for minutes at a time. According to Cox their system hasn't detected any issues or outages so they refuse to send someone to investigate. I was willing to accept the fact that I'd probably be charged $75 for the truck roll but at least I'd have someone come out and maybe resolve the issues. Unfortunately I'm not worth their time apparently. I'm told that because their system doesn't show an issue they won't send a tech... Now, to be clear, I'm having to chat with this person using my Verizon mobile hotspot because my Cox connection was completely down but I still don't qualify for assistance. This is absolutely the worst customer service I have encountered with my home services and refuse to pay $150 per month for service that isn't worth Cox's time to fix when it is obviously not working correctly. Has anyone else had this happen? What did you do? Was it ever resolved? Should I just change ISP's? Thanks... JP
Frequent Packet Loss with no support
I've been having issues with Cox ever since moving across town. My packet loss and the variation of my ping is unreal. I've had a tech come out to look and we've ruled out the connections within the home are the issue. I purchased a brand new modem so that Cox would get off my case about it being my modem, and I am still experiencing the same problems. I have several tracerouts and log files of continuous pings to show the packet loss and latency variations. I see some as soon as the second and third hop. This issue is beginning to consume most of my day, and it's really frustrating. My speculation is that it's a oversaturated node issue, just hoping to get some answers and a resolution. If that doesn't work, I'm off to file an informal complaint, then formal, and so on until it's resolved.You're Not Crazy It's Happening To Everyone
I can't read one more. I can't read one more post that says, "my modem drops dozens of times a day, and comes back up minutes later, sometimes it's unusable for HOURS, I've rebooted, and reset, and refreshed, and I've replaced ALL of my equipment, I've called Cox dozens of times, techs have visited my house over and over, and it's STILL HAPPENING, EVERY DAY." It's not a user-end issue, and I can't believe that with ALL OF THESE IDENTICAL REPORTS (and you can add mine - identical), that Cox is just plum mystified (and always, EXTREMELY RETICENT TO ISSUE ANY KIND OF CREDIT FOR THEIR BREACH OF CONTRACT). It's too much. That's enough. The Federal Communications Commission is there to protect consumers from this fraud and abuse, and by God, I'll be calling on them to do so. Investigative journalists live to expose greed and corruption, and the lack of antitrust measures governing utilities like Cox is fertilizer for the kind of stink Cox gives you for hundreds of dollars a month. So anyway, does anyone have any suggestions, he asked rhetorically. (incidentally, the sheer VOLUME of tags, crowd-sourced, shows where the stakeholders are:)