Is this a new support model from Cox Communications?

I have been a customer of theirs for nearly 15 years now in the East Phoenix Valley. What started with cable eventually grew into internet and eventually digital phone. Since becoming a customer I've seen their support model grow and the ability to actually talk to someone who works for Cox dwindle and fade. Even today, most of the support you receive (phone or at your  home) is actually provided by a third party contractor working for Cox.

For the last several years I've noticed a degradation in the quality of my internet service at home. The funny part is that they started charging me more for a higher-speed service. So after getting tired of speeds ranging from 0.2 to 3.0 Mbps, I decided to do some research and discovered that I indeed had a higher limit service (that I was paying for) but I needed to upgrade my modem.

What? You mean you upgraded my service, charged me more, and never told me I needed to get a different, newer, modem to take advantage of the faster speeds? Yes sir, if you buy a DOCSIS 2.0 (or higher) modem, you will see faster speeds since we see nothing wrong with your line.

Now I have no issue in buying a new modem to support speeds that were 3-5 times faster than what I was getting with my old one, but....could you possibly tell me? Why charge me for a service that you knew (based on down the wire diagnostics) that I wasn't using? Shady? Perhaps.

So, I upgraded and my speeds now began to peak around 12 Mbps (down) and my up speeds were bouncing off of the 3 Mbps (about a 10x increase).

I was happy.

That was until recently; I've noticed performance start to shift and degrade at sporadic times during the day. Sometimes everything would be humming along and I would get kicked offline. So I would pick up the phone and there would be no dial tone.

Yup, internet and phone offline. Good thing my T-Mobile service is more reliable than my Cox systems.

So I was a tad upset and posted a less than nice tweet to Twitter:

Cox service sucks. Making me really question having hpone and internet with the same company.  (source)

Since this was more of a venting exercise I thought nothing of it until I received a public reply:

@CoxTech1? Want to help? Stop my Internet and Phone from going down at the same time. Glad my cellular service isn't at that level. (source)

This began a hailstorm of responses using direct messaging inside Twitter, a total of 10 back and forth messages, resulting in my tweet:

Super impressed that @CoxTech1 is taking the time to troubleshoot via Twitter (source)

Needless to say, I used Twitter to send some IP information, modem MAC address and some other data which resulted in a line diagnostic and appointment for today. At 8:45 am, End2End Technologies (for Cox) came by, did some in-home inspection and tightened all connections at the street, house. He also noticed some line noise and added some filters to address.

Is my problem solved? Until it's a regular business day and everyone is home cruising the web (around 6 pm), I can't tell.

Although, I am impressed. But they should know, I don't use their lame TV service, I have HD-Dish with my super dual DVR.

Before Service

After Service

The real test will be if it stays solid. Then again, bouncing against a real server in a really connected city, gives me significantly different results.

After Service, to LA

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