Doc Searls Weblog

19 responses to “Life in Cox tech support hell”

1. friendsofdave’s status on Saturday, 27-Jun-09 05:27:15 UTC – Identi.ca

   June 27, 2009 at 1:27 am

   […] [Doc Searls]: Life in Cox tech support hell. http://tinyurl.com/ppergb […]

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2. 

   Hunter

   June 27, 2009 at 1:29 am

   How’d you get them to boost you to 18/4?

   I’m in downtown SB and not getting anything near that with supposedly the highest level residential service they’ve got… I’m getting like 6/2 right now. Bahhhhh…

   Reply
3. 

   Doc Searls

   June 27, 2009 at 7:56 am

   Hunter, I’ve been paying for years to get Cox’s top grade of service. This is now what they call “premier.” The price is $64.95/month. It would be much less if I also used Cox for cable TV and/or phone. The last I checked, a year or more ago, “premier” bought me 10/1 Mbp/s.

   I noticed the last time I was here (which I am only every few months, since I now work in Boston and rent an apartment there) that the speeds had gone up considerably, though not to the ~18/4 I’m getting now at the top end. According to a call a few days ago to Netgear, this is because my 2006 vintage Netgear router/vpn/firewall couldn’t handle Cox’s downstream speeds. That device is now out of the picture and I have a direct connection. Of course, the rest of the house is now out of the picture and has no connection. Things will stay out until I get a new 8-port router/switch. (Recommendations welcome.) And I won’t do that until Cox fixes the failure problem.

   In your case I suspect you’re on an old plan that never got upgraded.

   Cox’s plans and price breaks are here. To see what they’ll do at your address, go here.

   Cox does offer “business” service levels. As is the custom with all cable and phone companies, the price is a multiple of the residential deals, for slower data rates. The best you can do for business is 15/3Mbp/s for $315. That also gets you one static IP address. More are available at additional cost.

   Supposedly service is better. From about 2002-2005 I had a business as well as a residential account, because I wanted static IP addresses and good service. Residential then delivered 3/.35 Mbps while Business delivered 1/.35Mbps. The former was about $35/month, as I recall; and the latter was over $100/month. The service, however, was minimal with both. In fact I got somewhat better action out of the residential account than the business one. So I dropped the business account and stuck with residential.

   Meanwhile, all this makes me appreciate my Verizon FiOS service in Boston. For less than I’m paying Cox, I get a solid 20/20Mbps, and a faster route to a human being at their call center, on the rare occasion when I need service.

   Anyway, if I were you I’d give Cox a call. Or, better yet, visit their local offices by Gelson’s at Las Positas and State. Because on the phone you’ll be dealing with robots. Although I suppose calling Sales might get you to a human faster. I haven’t tried. Good luck.

   Reply
4. 

   azbaer

   June 27, 2009 at 9:15 am

   I was having slowness issues as well with COX. I ended up buying a new modem and all is well. I ran the cox test I had mix result high then low. up soild 3.13Mbs Down stream had 17MBs noe getting 11MB’s. I have been thinking about switching to DSL

   Reply
5. 

   JohnO

   June 27, 2009 at 9:51 am

   A couple of questions/comments:

   1) You say you have rebooted your cable modem a number of times. Just to be clear, have you power-cycled the cable modem, or pressed a reset button? Sometimes a Power cycle will solve things that a reset doesn’t.

   2) Have you unplugged your cable modem from power and let it sit disconnected for more than 15 minutes? At some locations, I have seen this help. I am not sure why, other than it might be long enough for the upstream gear to “forget” about you and reconnect in a different way when you show up on the network again.

   3) Has the tech replaced the cable modem? I had weird performance issues after a local Comcast network upgrade, and it turned out my four year old cable modem had issues. A newer cable modem fixed the problem.

   4) I think Cox is focusing at your cable modem because the big increase in hop times enters at the second hop on your traceroute or ping tests (68.6.40.1). I am not sure if that IP is your cable modem, or the device just beyond your cable modem. If I ping 68.6.40.1 from my location on Comcast in Minnesota, my ping times are reasonable (about 110 ms) with no packet loss). If you browse to http://ipchicken.com/ you can see your public IP address, and determine if you are 68.6.40.1, or an IP beyond that.

   5) Do you have any near by neighbors on Cox that you could ask to do a traceroute to see if they also pass through that same device? If you could show Cox that your neighbors pass through it, and also see a delay, that would add more weight to the problem being outside of your house.

   Good Luck, Doc!

   John

   Reply
6. 

   Mic Edwards

   June 27, 2009 at 11:08 am

   I was going to give you a blistering rant about first world problems …

   Then I fired up a terminal. And this is what I saw:

   PING ucsb.edu (128.111.24.40): 56 data bytes
   64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=254.424 ms
   64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=215.000 ms
   64 bytes from 128.111.24.40: icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=257.888 ms

   AND HERE’S THE KICKER:

   I live in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam … and that’s the speed on my ADSL line.

   Wow. Either mine has been getting better or things really are dire at your place.

   Mind you, I don’t see anything like 18/4 … 🙁

   I hope it improves!

   Reply
7. 

   Hunter

   June 27, 2009 at 12:11 pm

   Yeah, I have ‘Premiere’ also. A bit faster in a test this morning but it sounds like your ‘tubes’ are clearer than mine. 🙂

   My mother-in-law has the biz service – pricier but (at least these days) support is staffed with actually knowledgeable network ops folks (though I don’t think they are local).

   I’ve got a friend at Cox (after layoffs in their Goleta office, one of the last left – almost everything has been moved to San Diego) so maybe I’ll see if he can get anything done.

   Verizon told me a year ago that they were moving FIOS into SB, though they were very fuzzy about exactly where service would be available and when. Not holding my breath.

   Reply
8. 

   Hunter

   June 27, 2009 at 12:13 pm

   Not to spam this thread but I just re-ran the test this AM:

   17/3

   Talk about variance.

   Reply
9. 

   Doc Searls

   June 27, 2009 at 6:53 pm

   Hunter, does Cox still have the Goleta office? I was once at a meeting there where they actually told us that Santa Barbara was the last place the company deployed anything new. Smallest market, farthest away.

   FWIW, one of the techs who came to my house (nowhere near the middle of town) told me we were “way out there” and “at the end of the line.” Not sure what to conclude from that.

   I think the 18/4 speed is a “burst” measure on the downstream side.

   Reply
10. Daily Digest as of 6:00pm for 2009.06.27 -blog.px

    June 27, 2009 at 9:03 pm

    […] shared Life in Cox tech support hell — 10:15pm via Google […]

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11. 

    ski

    June 28, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Doc

    I have seen similar events occur over the years. It almost always (80/20 rule) ends with, “we had no idea that the change that the guys in XYZ Department made last week could affect us.” Or words to that effect.

    It is hard to believe that in 2009, given the success of the internet, that so called “technicians” have no concept of systems (or holistic) thinking. The unstated motto is “local optima to the max!”

    I would bet two bits that a new fill_in_the_blank was recently installed. A new router perhaps. Or new routing entries in a table somewhere. A new monitoring agent of some nature. Something.

    I have seen techies drop routes (for routers on their internal network) and deny having ever done so… until I produce trace routes showing that fact.

    Bottom line, you are probably not going to have any success in the short term. Sorry. But as you only noticed it when you returned, you have no idea when they implemented the change that hosed your connection.

    Again, I have called the very next day, and had it take a week to get a “techie” to figure out that some bozo hosed the system. Even when I started the conversation with, “you guys changed something or implemented something at 2:00AM this morning that caused the problem.” (Thank God for cron; but even with a smoking gun, almost no one ever consults common sense!)

    Wish I was more hopeful… but until they connect the dots that an internal change caused the situation, they cannot help you.

    -ski

    Reply
12. 

    Jay

    July 1, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    I had the EXACT same problem with Comcast a few years ago. They show me some BS diagnostic, but everywhere else I go packets are lost and connections time out. I would tell them this and show them where the packets were lost, and where the bottleneck was (their servers) and they would give me a baffled look and tell me they would send some other technician to jiggle my cables in a few weeks.

    The problem with my local Comcast was that they had over enrolled and couldn’t actually provide the bandwidth promised to all their customers. This is pretty common with ISP’s that lack local competition.

    Reply
13. 

    John

    July 6, 2009 at 2:11 am

    I’m on the west side and having the same problems. Every evening the cable modem starts dropping the connection every ten or fifteen minutes. Rebooting the cable modem brings the connection back up temporarily only to drop it again in a few minutes. Seems to come in waves. Last week it was fine. This week it’s been hell. My neighbor is having the same problem.

    The funny thing is that I am able to release and renew my IP address from Cox, so I know the cable modem is connected and talking to Cox’s DHCP servers. It’s just not getting beyond that point.

    I know better than to try and call tech support, so I tried chat. We got as far as “you are going to have to connect your computer directly to the modem before we can troubleshoot” when I repeated for the third time that it wasn’t an issue on my end.

    So i’ve sent in an email from the support page of their web site. Hopefully it will find it’s way into the deeper dungeons of tech support where someone might actually know something about what is going on with their routing (which I assume to be the problem).

    I’ll let you know if I find anything. And please let us know if you do as well.

    Reply
14. 

    Dan

    July 11, 2009 at 5:07 pm

    I’ve been running into the same difficulties with Cox service and found this helpful blog, so thanks to everyone – now I can answer all my family’s complaints with “it’s not a problem with our equipment, it’s Cox…”.

    I do have a question about one of the results of the Cox diagnostic tool. Both Doc Searls and I get this line about a local limitation of 10 Mbps Ethernet subnet. I am connected via ethernet cable to a 54 Mbps wireless / 100 Mbps ethernet router. Well, my PC says it’s on a 100 Mbps ethernet connection, and the advertised specs on the Cox cable/telephone/modem say it’s 10/100, so where is the hold-up? It must be that the Cox box is not supplying more than 10 Mbps ethernet. Am I missing something?

    thanks,
    Dan

    Reply
15. 

    Doc Searls

    July 11, 2009 at 6:43 pm

    Dan, I’m told that the Unix utility they use (and I’ve seen it elsewhere) always says that. And that “other network traffic is congesting the link.” I wouldn’t worry about it.

    Reply
16. Customers Are Talking » Blog Archive » Customers are talking: Doc Searls runs up against “Simply Everything”’s limits

    July 27, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    […] with suppliers (perhaps part of his work on Vendor Relationship Management), such as Apple and Cox Cable. Today, he wrote about Sprint and a $500 bill he got from them when he unwittingly exceeded his […]

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17. Doc Searls Weblog · What’s 10,241,704.22kb between ex-friends?

    August 2, 2009 at 8:34 am

    […] at my house in Santa Barbara for weeks after I got back there in June. I wrote about that here, here, here, here and here. So I used my Sprint datacard a […]

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18. 

    Steve Davidson

    June 30, 2010 at 12:26 pm

    Doc,
    We are using Cox at both our office and home, and I would like to be able to use the outbound mail from home, but everytime I go home I have to change it to: smtp.central.cox.net instead of our company account and Cox says there is nothing they can do about it. Is this normal???

    Reply
    1. 

       Doc Searls

       July 7, 2010 at 3:41 am

       In a word, yes. Most mail software, however, allows you to set up different profiles for different locations. See if yours does.

       Reply