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.
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.
Internet Gigablast
So I am not alone who is getting slow speeds with Gigablast.... So i ask the moderators of this forum, when will we get the speeds of Gigablast? I have been paying for over a year and last September 2020 when the schools started online, my speed has not reached a gig barely 700 mostly <500. Do I need to make a complaint to the FCC because I'm paying a lot for my internet and with no resolve or compensation or credit. I feel like I'm getting robbed here. With the pandemic money does not come easy to make ends meet. I am sure management knows about this issue and has done absolutely nothing to resolve this among the dozens of customers on this forum reporting the same issue as I. The techs have no clue what's wrong. They waste their time coming out.
