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Used to be good service decade ago, but has since turned into one of the worst there is. Company only cares about profits, doesn't care about the customer. The nodes are oversaturated or the equipment is aging. Once every few months the service becomes unusable, taking close to a month to fix. Rinse and repeat this throughout the years. Services are outrageously priced. They used to offer uncapped services, then they limited to 1TB caps nearly a decade ago and had not upped them until the pandemic. They added a mere 250GB more to be at 1.25TB. One needs to pay an addition $50 to be able to use the bandwidth over the low datacap limit of 1.25 TB. Company uses borderline false advertising, as they market "fiber based infrastructure", but services are actually DOCSIS coax based in my area. In order to get cheaper priced services you need to go through so many hoops that won't always work. Too many steps in that dance. It gets old. Company doesn't respect long time customers as they do new customers. member for 1.8 years, 813 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 1 year ago
During the day, when everyone is at work, I will get the speeds I pay for - 20Mbps down and 2Mbps up. Every night at 10PM the speeds drop to a crawl...1 to 5Mbps down but the upload remains the same. Haven't really talked to customer support yet as I KNOW what I'm in for if I do...they're going to want to send a tech out to diagnose the situation. Nothing is wrong with my end...its theirs... It feels like they're overburdening their nodes and its just dragging everyone's speeds down. I don't know if that is a legitimate practice or what...or if its only temporary, or if they're even doing it....but it sure feels like it, and it is very annoying. I'm not getting what I am paying for. Update: 12/8/2009 Nearing the end of the year and the problems have only increased. Now I'm not only dealing with slow speeds but I'm getting tons of packet loss and lag spikes. I feel like I'm on dial-up right now. Web pages take minutes to load, I can't play any online games, I can't watch Youtube, I can't stream anything and there's no end in sight to the problems. Since my first review I've had a tech out, talked with various people on the Cox HSI forum here, talked with Cox tech support numerous times and yet, the problems just get worse. And on top of all of this, Cox is jacking up everyone's rates in Louisiana. Can you believe that? As soon as there is a viable alternative to Cox in this market, they can kiss me goodbye. Update: 12/22/2009 Thanks to a few truck rolls, and diligent testing for packet loss, it appears packet loss issues are because of a noise problem on the ingress to the node I'm on. Maybe once this is fixed my connection quality will increase. Will update. Update: 1/17/2010 Packet loss issues had receded for a couple weeks, experiencing it very little. Now it is back with a vengeance - the internet connection has been completely useless all day long and it is only 7:20PM. This MAJOR PROBLEM! compounded with the INSANE node congestion we're experiencing is very unacceptable. It is very sad that Cox has a complete monopoly over data services here in Jefferson Parish, LA. But I highly suggest that anyone looking to get service anywhere in southern Louisiana go for someone else. It seems that Cox Communications generally does not care about it's customers here. As it stands right now, as soon as a competitor (U-Verse) pulls into the market here I'm switching. Update: 2/28/2010 To help clarify things here, I've been dealing with two problems... 1. Node congestion. 2. Packet loss The node congestion started first, around late August of 2009, then came the packet loss a few months after. After going back and forth with engineers etc for months, my node was split on February 10th, 2010. I want to say thankyou to everyone who helped me with this issue. However, after the node split, problems still persisted. Random speed drops (especially during peak hours) still occur and packet loss just kills my connection. On the weekends, particularly Sundays, the packet loss is most severe. I'm guessing its related to how much bandwidth is being utilized in my local area here, and there's a problem with the plant, but I don't know. I can't get out there and check it myself...if I could I would. And I can't go around my neighborhood asking for everyone's nightly internet schedule so I can plan my work around it all. Remember what I mentioned about Sundays being particularly worse? Well imagine having 50% packet loss spikes that last for 5 minutes at a time, happening every 10 minutes. That's what I'm dealing with as I type this, every weekend, and randomly on weekdays/weeknights. I haven't heard from my local contact with Cox in a week, and I haven't seen any Cox bucket trucks around here, so I don't know if they're just giving up on it or what. I'd like to think they're still investigating the issue. Update: 3/5/2010 Got back in contact with local rep and we're working toward a solution. Will update. Update: 4/12/2010 I should have updated this sooner but never got around to it. For a few weeks now, the problems seem to have disappeared. There isn't any packet loss or random drops in speed at random times of the day - the connection is pretty stable now, and fast. Thankyou to everyone who helped me with this problem because it lasted for quite a long time and there were points when I thought it would never get fixed. But thanks to good local engineers/reps/techs, the problems have gone away. I hope it stays this way. Update: 8/23/2010 Now I'm back to square one - seems like node congestion but according to a reply from an e-mail to a local rep, the high pings and slow speeds are due to Cox upgrading the network equipment in the area. Well that was told to me over a month ago and the problem persists. We're past the 2 month mark and moving into the third month of the issue. I am now asking for help once again and I am expecting to be helped. My last e-mail to my local Cox rep has gone unanswered for quite some time now and I am hoping he is just on vacation. I will not tolerate this for very much longer. AT&T's U-Verse has finally gone live here and if I have to switch companies to get reliable service, it will be done. I simply will not deal with what I had to go through last time to get these issues fixed. Update: 11-23-2016 Edit: 12-2-2016 So the issues with Cox were fixed after my last review and things went well for quite some time. I was happy, content, and never really thought about switching services, due to Cox having a vastly superior speed. However, starting a few months ago, my upload speed showed signs of being limited. How you say? If I'm uploading to a single source, server, client, what have you, I get minimal upload speed - usually between 500 Kbps and 1 Mbps. If I am uploading to multiple sources at a time, my upload speed increases and I can max out my upstream connection. But this only happens if I am uploading to between 6-10 servers at a time. So if I'm attempting to transfer a file between home and work, my connection is USELESS. If I'm attempting to get an important file to anybody, anywhere, my connection is USELESS. Techs have been out before and claim my line status is perfect - the best they've ever seen - and then leave. 1 Upload Stream... »[Cable Speed test: 153.09/0.87 50 ms] »[Cable Speed test: 153.79/0.93 33 ms] 3 Upload Streams... »[Cable Speed test: 154.54/6.56 30 ms] 8 Upload Streams... »[Cable Speed test: 168.44/11.03 51 ms] OH, and lets look back at my connection before Cox's 150 Mbps speed "upgrade"....before all of this started happening. This is ONE UPLOAD STREAM. »[Cable Speed test: 114.34/13.52 42 ms] Edit: 12-2-2016 After a lot of troubleshooting and investigation into the issue with which I'm dealing, I have a field tech scheduled to visit. Hopefully he or she can find some small problem somewhere and fix it. I do hope this is the case because if this problem is escalated to plant engineering, it will take week(s) to resolve. This whole situation is unacceptable. Edit:. 11-5-2021 Since my last review, service has been shoddy - a few months of good service then a month of garbage. This repeated until 2020 - two solid years now of noise on the line causing packet loss. Cox will not remedy the problem no matter what I do, and I've had it. AT&T hooked up VDSL2 service at the end of October and although the download speeds aren't as fast as Cox, I get 2 Mbps more upstream at 12 Mbps total and the service is consistently reliable. And as a plus, it looks like AT&T Fiber will be live here within the next year, which will put the final nail in the coffin for Cox....forever. If Cox could somehow repair their network in the next 30 days, I would probably stay with them until AT&T Fiber goes live here (I really need the download speeds), but the chances of that happening...well.. Let's just say we would all have a better chance of being struck by lightning, hit by a crashing airplane, and then finally vaporized by a meteor strike...all within a minute's time. Update: 12-9-2022 AT&T Fiber went live here in May of 2022 and I have subscribed to that service since. Will not ever be going back to Cox. Good riddance. member for 14.5 years, 2366 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 1.2 years ago
Price is going up and speed is more limited. member for 18.3 years, 1000 visits, last login: 65 days ago updated 2.6 years ago
2/23/2016 upgraded to ultimate for $90 for 1 year comes with a 2TB cap which sucks(should have no cap) they don't charge you (yet) if you go over you just get a letter by email 1/25/2017 cox has decided to push money grab data caps on every one if you have a Unlimited service option take it I will be removing all cox services in the near future I can no longer recommend them as a ISP. 4/27/201 I have canceled all cox services and moved to Tulsa And got AT&T fiber the price is better $70 for a 1 Gb up an down with zero data cap I can no longer recommend cox unless it your only option. member for 16.8 years, 8354 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 3 years ago
I got Cox Express back in November of 2001 and the service was rock solid. The speed was at the caps and the pings were low. The problem was that there was no e-mail or news service, and the routing out of the local AT&T DS3's wasn't exactly terrific. Had some problems with connection drops, but thanks to the Cox staff at DSLR and the Local Cox guys, the problem was fixed and service has been great since (almost a year ago now). Now, warp into 2003. We're being converted to Cox High Speed Internet. We're pretty much on the new HSI network already, and the new features like e-mail, newsgroups, webspace, local start page are now being added to Ocala/Gainesville users. We also have an optional 3000/256Kbps tier. The only problem with all this is that while 3000/256 service costs $39.95 in Pensacola and many other places, it costs us $59.99 a month. I don't like it, but I have lodged my complaints with Cox, lets see what happens. That said, I ordered the new tier earlier today and got a notification that it was active at about 3:00pm. All I can say is, WOW! 3200Kbps is my new average downstream speed, and I'm around 240Kbps up. The pings are good to most places, and the routing has become a lot better in the last 6 months. I wish they would lower the cost, but they're still lower than DSL for double the speed. I would highly recommend Cox to anyone. Also, please remember to stop by the Cox HSI forum here at BBR and take a look around. March 2004 Update: Since the DOCSIS 1.1 upgrade in this area, the service has been nothing short of perfect for me. My speeds have stabled out considerably, and they are always right at the peak. Pings are equally good, and the whole network seems to perform very well from my end. The e-mail/news servers also work well. Cox has been a little late in the game to SPAM filtering, but that's coming down the pike now too. The only thing I am dissatisfied with as a customer is the fact that in Pensacola, Cox HSI (3000/256Kbpp) service costs $39.95, and here it costs $59.95. In that context I feel like we're getting the short end of the stick. In the context of being the best value around here, I don't feel so bad because I feel it is. A tradeoff I guess. August 2004 Update: Well Cox just upgraded most markets to great speeds at no cost. That's great, but they left me out again. Sorry but the Value for the Money just took a hit. E-mail and news service has not been great lately either. That takes a hit on the review too. I hope I can raise them all back up this soon. January 2005 Update: Cox upgraded our market back in November and finally unified our pricing and speed with the rest of the Cox HSI nation. As that has really been my only quarrel, I am what you would call completely satisfied with this service. 5000/768Kbps and I'm always right at the cap, especially since pitching my old trusty Toshiba PCX1100u for a Motorola SURFboard 5100. The SURFboard is just much more stable in speed, and I noticed a big performance gain on the upload side. I feel like, for $52 a month I am getting a great value with the amount of speed they are providing. The service has been rock solid. The e-mail hiccups every now and then but its performance is acceptable, the Spam filter seems a little slow at adapting but Spam is less of a problem now that it was before. Also installed Cox Business Internet at my place of employment, the 6000/1000Kbps package, and the speeds are very stable and very close to the caps, so Cox has done a good job of managing the HFC to make sure its not overloaded with the new speed offerings in this area at least. Overall 5 Stars from me. March 2006: Ok well DSLR keeps bugging me to update my review. Not much has changed, other than Cox has upped our speed in the area to 9/1Mbps service for the premier tier. Only thing I can say about that is I get 9/1Mbps speeds all the time! The pings are solid and low, the service remains solid, overall it continues to be an excellent experience. I've still got my trusty Motorola SURFBoard 5100 doing the honors, runs like a champ. As I said last time, for $52 a month, I feel like I am getting my money's worth. The only negative part to the Cox HSI experience is that the newsgroup service has deteriorated considerably. They use to have a 5 star newsgroup system, now its barely usable at all. Except for that, the service is top notch. June 2007: I'm still running along on Cox HSI Premier tier. Speeds have been bumped to 12/1Mbps, and we now have PowerBoost which I have personally hit over 21Mbps during a download, so that is pretty sweet. I am hoping soon for 15/2Mbps but realistically, without meaningful competition from Embarq I doubt we'll see this for a while. I've got a Motorola SURFboard 5120 now, it seems to do its thing quite happily. On the negative side, Cox has implemented broken DNS which redirects mistyped URLs to advertisements, which frankly pisses me off. Tier 1 phone support is as stupid as ever. The techs here on DSLR make up for it though. They've outsourced the news servers to Highwinds, which is a group of idiots. Its completely unusable now, I don't even try anymore, which may have been the plan all along. Overall still recommended, but there are some ominous signs developing. January 2008: Time for an update. I still have the Cox HSI Premier tier, speeds are still 12/1Mbps, but with PowerBoost it often feels faster. The service has been extremely stable lately and overall I have no real complaints. I still am not happy about the DNS redirection scheme, but I have bypassed that by using different, RFC compliant DNS servers. I don't even try the news groups anymore. The e-mail works pretty good and the storage size and attachment size are generous. The Cox employee presences here on the DSLR boards is second to none, and those guys deserve a big thank you from all of us for dedicating their time to helping us out here. Overall I still highly recommend Cox for internet, tv, and phone services. October 2008: Still going strong with Cox HSI. Speeds are still stuck at 12/1Mbps for the time being, although they have been upgrading their plant to 1GHz, so maybe some speed increases are in the works. No real complaints about the service; it delivers blazing fast speed, is very reliable, and is generally as advertised. They still use their DNS redirects to ads, but I get around that by using alternate DNS servers. Newsgroups continue to decline, I wouldn't be surprised to see them pull the plug on it soon. Webspace is very lacking. All in all, it delivers 100% on being a fast and reliable pipe to the internet. The extras, such as webspace, newsgroups, are very lacking, but luckily there are alternatives that make it a moot point. May 2010: Still using Cox HSI. Speeds are now at 15/1.5Mbps, with PowerBoost that regularly surges them into 20/5+Mbps while its active. I have to be honest, there isn't much to report. Its still reliable. The speed is still the best in this area by far, but is stagnant. The value for the money has declined a bit; I consider continuous improvement to be a value and it doesn't seem to be happening nearly as much now. Overall I think its a great service, its a little pricey, but still better than DSL any day. January 2013: Still using Cox HSI. Speeds are now 36/5Mbps with Powerboost up to 45/6Mbps (I actually see speeds much higher than that). Not too much to report, other than the recent multi-day e-mail outage. Its the best speed for the money, its miles ahead of DSL. The price is a little high, tech support outside of the guys here on DSLR is sketchy, but overall highly recommended. July 2016: I'm still here with Cox HSI. Speeds are now 50/5Mbps, still has PowerBoost up to 63/6Mbps. Recently upgraded the modem to an Arris SB6190, Cox is bonding 24 downstream channels and 4 upstream channels in this market. They also recently rolled out IPv6 and although there have been some bumps with it, their engineers have been proactive in fixing the issues have been available here in the forums. I also think phone/chat support has gotten better but it is still hit or miss. The prices are my only real complaint, the value for the money is not as good as it once was. Overall, I'm happy with the service I receive, and it is so far beyond anything CenturyLink DSL can offer in this area it is the only thing I can recommend. January 2021: I'm leaving Cox for, unbelievably, CenturyLink DSL. Cox has been awful since June after a storm came through the area and obviously damaged something, we have had near constant upstream noise that kills the connection. The price has continued to go up while the quality has tanked. CenturyLink has 140/20Mbps bonded VDSL2 now and so far it works great. Cox has really tanked and I'm sad to see it happen. member for 23.1 years, 8975 visits, last login: 2 days ago updated 3.2 years ago
I can only use Cox. There are many innuendos I can make but I will refuse and say CHI instead. CHI does indeed manage to do what it says; it delivers what it promises, and I get fast speeds from fast servers. However, it is my only option. I want fiber. I can't get fiber. I get a fast dl speed with a datacap. It's unfortunate. I installed myself. It was very simple if you know what to do, and even better with your own modem; usually just a call but not even needed for me, it was plug and play. Overall I hate Cox but they do what they must and I pay what I must. member for 4.7 years, 32 visits, last login: 2.2 years ago lodged 3.4 years ago
Has went downhill, hit rock bottom and has started to dig. I guess they are blaming everything on the pandemic. B.S. is what I say. They have an outdated system, and can't handle all the at home workers. I get disconnects through out the day. When I search a web page it reminds me of dial up days, SLOW especially if there are a lot of graphics. What use to be pricey but worth it has now become over priced, and lousy. Poor service, poor speeds, you name it, just poor including wait times, appointments, callbacks. They have a monopoly where we are at so it's Cox, Dish or ATT, the latter two only having 45MB in my area which is slower then the crippled Cox. As soon as someone has fiber, color me gone. I can't wait to see Cox in my rear view mirror. member for 22 years, 8269 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 3.4 years ago
Cox customer since 2001, but "cut the cord" and dumped their TV services in 2015, now internet only, using streaming providers like Netflix and CBS-All-access for much less expensive TV than Cox bundles. Current service level: "Ultimate 300 Classic" internet-only Original equipment is long gone (purchased current Docsis 3.1 gear from Best-Buy) Current cable modem: Arris SB8200 Current wireless router: Asus RT-AC86U Separate wireless router as I prefer to have exclusive control over the firewall and WiFi configuration, which one doesn't get when Cox provides one of their integrated modem / router combinations since Cox controls ALL of the firmware embedded in the combination devices. For anyone making any significant use of WiFi features, having Cox change the firmware without notice can be very disruptive - with my setup this doesn't happen. I've had fairly frequent contact with Cox customer service over the years... seems like about every other spring, the errors logged by the modem, (particularly uncorrectables, dynamic-range-window-violations and T3/T4 timeouts), start increasing in frequency and I start experiencing lots of random logouts from Internet services. Cure for this usually winds up involving a truck roll for a tech to come out and check things out - the most common 'resolution' of the problem has been the 'drop-line' buried cable run from the house out to the street-main "tap" has gone bad and needed to be replaced... but EIGHT TIMES IN FIVE YEARS?? Update (8/27/2020): 2020 has Cox circling the drain with regards to internet service quality... here's today's link to speedtest results: »www.speedtest.net/my-res ··· 30ed5ae8 That from a supposedly "Ultimate 300 Classic" account which supposed to be 300 mbit down / 30 mbit up. member for 22.7 years, 1013 visits, last login: 2.1 years ago updated 3.5 years ago
Ordered Internet Pro 150, advertised at 150mbps down and 5 up, for two people who stream videos but aren't gamers. The installation was quick and easy. I'm using a Motorola mg7550 router with a Lenovo Flex 5 laptop. There is some competition for WiFi channels, but not enough to explain why my average download speed is around 35mbps. member for 3.6 years, driveby review (so far) lodged 3.6 years ago
I have been with Cox for about 4 years now, and never had any real issues with them up until they recently started throttling/blocking seeding on the BitTorrent network. I use BT to distribute software I write, as well as a downloading method for high demand content such as a new Linux distro or patch for a game. Now the only thing that keeps me with Cox is the downstream speed, although I am considering taking a 1 mbps hit in order to go with Qwest. I don't understand how this company will punish customers for fully utilizing their internet connection. I guess it is just easier/cheaper to block it than to upgrade their networks to actually provide the service they advertise. To sum up, I only recommend Cox for users who absolutely need higher downstream than DSL. If you want upstream you will want to go with DSL if available in your area. Currently with Cox I have 512kbps upstream that I only get to use while sending requests to webpages which never fully utilizes the full pipe. The minute I try to use it for somthing useful (BitTorrent) it gets throttled. Why have 512kbps if all you can use it for is sending HTTP/Get requests. A 128kbps upstream would suffice for that traffic. --Update (Jan 21, 2007) Perhaps it was a problem on my end that sorted itself out, or Cox was just testing out traffic shaping. It appears that I can now upload at full speed while using BitTorrent. I used the same test of a torrent I made, with my neighbor connecting to the torrent as the only other peer. Before he would start downloading at full speed and it would slow down after about a minute. Now it starts up and stays steady through the duration of the test. --Update (Mar 1, 2007) Well our neighbors are having a brick wall put up to replace an aged wood fence, and while digging the foundation for the wall the wall builders managed to cut our cable line. IIRC Blue Stake (»www.azbluestake.com) is free to call out to mark gas/power/cable/water/etc, but they did not do this. Thankfully they only got the cable line. They also offered to "fix" it. I decided to let them "fix" it just out of curiosity as to what their "fix" was. They crimped new terminators to either side and used a coax coupler and wrapped it in electrical tape. No anti-corrosion putty or gel, just electrical tape protecting the metal terminators (This is to be burried FYI) I called Cox and explained (expecting to pay some money) what happened and they set up an appointment for early the next day to come out and fix it. They ran a new line from the box at the street, removed the old line(s) and buried the new line, as well as scheduled a future appointment to run the cable through the wall once it is finished. All free of charge. Thanks Cox! --Update (June 18, 2020) Cox has seriously gone downhill in both quality and value. They are unwilling to diagnose noise issues with their plant and will try to blame internal wiring and sell you a support plan to troubleshoot noise issues. They hijack your DNS queries so if you mistype a URL, they will serve you ads instead of an error page. They increase the price and lower the upstream speeds for the ultimate tier. They implement a 1TB data cap on all tiers and charge you an insane amount per GB over the 1TB limit. They sell you an "unlimited" data plan, but will throttle your entire node if any sub is saturating the upstream and will deactivate your account if you use "excess" data. "Excess" data is not defined and determined by Cox on a case-by-case basis so you don't know what is excess. They are more interested in maintaining their monopoly by suing cities that entertain competitors (Google Fiber, muni fiber, etc), than they are maintaining and upgrading their infrastructure. The only alternative at my address (and most of the city) is 1.5mbps DSL through CL so I will be stuck with Cox until I move. There is no competition in my market so you have to just bite the pillow. member for 20.1 years, 2850 visits, last login: 4 days ago updated 3.7 years ago
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