Average 150 mbps down on Gigablast
I’ve been averaging 100-150mbps downloads for months now, even after I upgraded to Gigablast. I’ve contact COX multiple times on the app and been told that my modem (which I own) is responding slowly to their signal. I contacted Arris support (at COX suggestion) and they said that my modem’s downstream and upstream power, and signal to noise ratio are out of optimal level. Their conclusion is that COX signal is too weak and needs to be increased. So I contact COX tech support again and give them the information from Arris. The tech tells me that the signal looks good in their end and that my modems power snd noise levels are great. Uh... what the heck? I asked the tech how the signal could look good when the modems stats aren’t optimal (and I’ve logged into the modem and checked them myself)... and I kid you not... the tech says that COX uses different parameters than the manufacture. Even though the modem I own is approved and authorized by COX to be used with their service. I have a service call tomorrow and they tell me that if they determine there is nothing wrong with their signal that I will get charged $75. Im so close to cancelling my service. The competitor doesn’t offer comparable speeds but they are half the price for the speeds I’m only getting now.
Rejected messages
It appears the new spam filtering service Cox is using (cloudfilter.net) is blocking a lot of valid mail. I would like to know where our individual portals and addressbooks are that we can configure our own whitelists and to be able to see what messages are being rejected. It is one thing to be identify a message as spam, and another thing entirely to reject them without notification. I have mail senders from a good number of places and since my mail volume has dropped by over 75%, it is quite safe to assume the spam aggressiveness thresholds are set quite high as well as are the bulk sender identifiers and anti-spoofing features. While you claim to not whitelist senders, you do need to provide your users the ability to do so. No doing so means you are censoring email Also, it is poor form to put a like to review changes and then have it error out. http://postmaster.cox.net/confluence/display/postmaster/Error+Codes If you are going to implement such a service you should become a lot more responsive with corrective actions. I am now on my second day waiting for an answer on my ticket with Tier 2, and third day with the actual issue at large.
Call Centers, Qualifications, and Clowns
Today's New York Times has a very interesting letter-to-the-editor. It's from a college student who works part-time in her university's financial-aid call center. Through this experience she has become very cynical. She reports how supervisors emphasize "staying on script," staying cool no matter how heart-wrenching the problem, and "giving a short wait time" rather than actually resolve the caller's financial aid problems. She basically says the whole thing is a charade whose, possibly unintended, most serious effect is to get people to sign up for a lifetime of debt. Well, when we call into Cox, use its chat facilities, or post on this forum and engage with Cox's "Social Media Specialists" we're essentially dealing with a call center. And I suspect many of the behind-the-scenes realities are very similar to what the student describes at the financial-aid call center. But there's one very important difference: the financial-aid call center deals almost completely with bureaucratic/administrative issues ("fill in form #xyz"), but Cox's is dealing with a complex technology. I would be very surprised if, like other corporations, Cox does not try to cut costs by hiring people with minimal technical education to work in these call centers. My previous employer has an IT department with over 100 employees, but only three of them actually have degrees in computer science. The reason was that the employer did not want to pay the salaries required to get people with computer science degrees. Many of the people working there without such degrees are smart and dedicated. But I can tell you from personal experience there is a world of difference between someone whose technical knowledge of computers is no deeper than knowing how to program macros in Microsoft Word versus someone who's been taught to model mathematically database access times depending on hardware speeds and database configurations, how to set up a domain name service, the history and whys & wherefores of email, the built-in error mechanisms of TCP/IP, and to program in half-a-dozen languages, from assembly languages to C++ to Python. I can also tell you from personal experience that there's a world of difference between IT operations, like my former employer's, that hire minimally qualified people to staff its IT department versus those that spend more to hire people with engineering and computer science degrees who really understand the technology. I can recount faux pas after faux pas at my former employer, where the IT staff was simply too poorly educated and too inexperienced to do a good job. Also, let me add, that at a company like Cox perhaps 90% of all tech-support calls really do not require lots of technical knowledge to resolve. For such instances I have no problem with Cox hiring people without much technical education to staff such jobs. But in a technical industry, there's always strong temptation to go beyond the limits of one's own knowledge and either try to solve problems one is not qualified to solve, or to make up technical "explanations" that are just wrong and waste the time of both the support agent and customer. Here lies the transition from tech support to clown support: when someone doesn't know enough to know what they don't know, then they become a clown in a tragedy. (Here play Canio's arietta from Pagliacci.) Which brings me to the quality of Cox technical support. Do you know what are Cox's requirements for IT support positions? Do you have any experience where Cox's support people showed evidence of at least undergraduate training in computer science? Do you have any experience with Cox tech support where the agent clearly was not technically qualified to address your issue? What's been your experience? Mine has not been good.