Cox throttling speeds to gaming servers? I think so.
So I've just had it with Cox and their seemingly dishonest practice of blaming everything on the customer... I just got the 300mbps service in Las Vegas, and suspiciously get 500% increases in ping to gaming services as opposed to standard browsing/streaming service. I've validated everything is good to go on my end, and spent an hour or more being treated like a fool with Cox "technical support" people who don't even know what ping or traceroute are. As a background I've worked in IT for 15+ years and manage large load balanced networks like this for a living... Either there is an immense amount of ineptitude and apathy going on, or they're trying to push gamers to spend more money. My modem is a DOCSIS 3.1 enabled modem. My router is a gigabit router. I'm wired into the router with CAT6 cable, directly. My connection to the COX gateway is fast, and fine. The issue is the Cox internal routing. In this case, I'm going to use League of Legends for an example since they post their server IPs publicly. All I need to do to show where the breakdown is occurring is run a simple tracert. It's clear that I'm getting solid ping to Cox's gateway - langbprj01-ae1.rd.la.cox.net [68.1.1.13] - but they're choosing to route gaming traffic specifically through some kind of WAF, concentrator, or other type of internal network device which is throttling all traffic to 60-70ms (at lowest) The glaring technical evidence: Tracing route to 104.160.131.3 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms 192.168.1.1 2 9 ms 8 ms 7 ms 10.67.0.1 3 8 ms 8 ms 7 ms 100.127.4.164 4 11 ms 7 ms 11 ms 100.120.102.24 5 15 ms 16 ms 12 ms langbprj01-ae1.rd.la.cox.net [68.1.1.13] 6 60 ms 61 ms 61 ms 72.215.224.162 <---- the offending Cox IP. 7 61 ms 67 ms 65 ms 104.160.152.223 8 62 ms 61 ms 60 ms 104.160.152.227 9 67 ms 70 ms 70 ms 104.160.159.100 10 68 ms 67 ms 68 ms 104.160.131.3 So why are they throttling gaming speeds to 60-70ms? It doesn't really make sense until you realize they've just started marketing their "Cox Elite Gaming" service to unlock higher speeds for a premium monthly rate. The only problem? I CAN'T EVEN BUY THEIR EXTRA SERVICE IN MY AREA. Come on! If you're going to scam me into buying a premium service, at least offer the option to buy it! My only option has been to reduce my service to the 150mgps service (why bother with bandwidth if it's slow), and subscribe to Haste for a slight ping boost to try and compensate. Note - COX - you're losing money here. In the end I'm just getting screwed, and Cox is showing how dishonest they are. If they could explain exactly what that IP is and why they refuse to address it internally, maybe it will matter. Until then I'll be planning my exit ASAP.