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Curious about Cox Wi-Fi hotspot problems
I'm a new Cox customer after more than a decade in Comcast territory. I rely heavily on the Wi-Fi hotspot network and use one or more different hotspots every day. Since moving to Cox I noticed some strange behavior at coffee shops, restaurants, bars and other places that have Cox service. If a location has their own named, public hotspot I can connect to that and get expected speed/performance. If that same location also is also advertising a CoxWiFi hotspot, I can always get connected to a strong signal, but mostly I have no internet service. In other words, I can see a CoxWiFi hotspot with a strong signal. I can connect to that hotspot, but then I have no actual internet service. This has happened to me in many locations. Again today I am at Bourbon Jacks in Chandler AZ with the same problem. I'm trying to attach an image below, captured from my screen. You'll see the CoxWiFi network, but when I try using that I get no internet access. Switching to the Bourbon Jacks network I get a Cox connection with no problems. Is this normal, expected behavior? If the CoxWiFi isn't working, why is it being advertised? If the image isn't included below, try this URL: https://rstoeber.com/images/Cox-WiFi-hotspot-problem.pngPoor performance on CoxWiFi hotspots, but local hotspot good. Why? How?
I'm a relatively new Cox internet customer. Had Comcast for 15 years before this. I work from home as a tech consultant, which means that I use WiFi hotspots at bars, restaurants and coffee shops every day. I've noticed some odd (in a bad way) behavior on the Cox hotspots. My computer will automatically log me in to any CoxWiFi hotspot that it finds. Sometimes that works great, but only when there is no obvious native (local) hotspot configured. In other words, if I'm at Joe's Pizza and they have a PizzaFi network (provided by Cox) and they also have a CoxWiFi network, my computer will automatically connect to CoxWiFi. That's what it should do, but 90% of the time I can't actually reach the internet, or if I do, the connection is terribly slow with high latency and packet loss. If I then switch to PizzaFi (probably using the same Cox modem/router) I get a fast, normal internet connection. In a few places I can reliably use either the local named WiFi or the CoxWiFi and both give consistent, reliable speeds. But that's really the exception. In most places with multiple network options I can't use the CoxWiFi because it's so unreliable, even though it offers a strong signal. I don't understand how, or why this would be happening. Does this make sense to anyone?