Cox is a POS

[Bryan O'Neal]

I consider an outage any interruption in service lasting more then 45
seconds.  For business purposes I consider any provider who has less
then a 99.9976% uptime to be "unreliable"  That said Cox has been really
good for my home use, but I use wholesale Qwest T1's with TWTC service
for my office.

Cox is what I would consider good burstable bandwidth at a cheep price,
but it is not quality and it is not business grade reliable.  Though I
wish they would provide to my office so I could pick up a cheep
secondary connection for high burst items (massive uploads/downloads,
online backups and restores, or even normal web traffic when my T1's
become saturated with high priority traffic).

These are personal opinions.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of
KevinO
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 8:58 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Cox is a POS

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Wayne Davis wrote:
> I've had Cox Broadband for about 4 years and it has been VERY
reliable.
> 
How do you know?

What do you consider reliable?

I have a busine$$ account with multiple static IPs, check status each
minute, and
record changes of status. I do this because of my past experiences with
Cox, and
because a lot of people depend on my connectivity.

( Data is here: http://www.kevino.org/cox_status.txt )

I am conservative in what I call an outage - testing for 3 consecutive
failures
of ICMP packets to make it back from the gateway IP, after waiting 2 S
per
packet. I don't consider the status back up again unless all three
consecutive
packets make the trip, to help eliminate noise in the data due to
marginal cases.

I normally can flood ping the gateway IP with zero packet loss and 8 mS
avg ping
time.

There was a period from Oct 2006 until Mar 2007 without any logged loss
of
service. I would say that when their network works right, it works well.

I've been on the phone several times with Cox in the last 24 hours, and
have been
informed of 4 separate 'equipment failure' events during this time, each
of which
covered large areas, not just my street or local area.

BTW: I made a point to call during a period of uptime early this morning
and had
the modem tested by Cox, and it is working nominally. The modem and all
data
equipment here runs on filtered UPS power too.

Hence, I have come to a second conclusion: These equipment failures are
not
random failures.

Large ISPs such as Cox and Qwest do not really care about their
customers - they
don't have to.

One of my favorite pastimes is to call Cox during normal business hours
and sit
in the on-hold loop waiting for tech. support, where every 10 seconds a
voice
comes on "...[thanking me] for my patience..."!

I've logged 15 events just since 3am this morning....

Cheers,
- --
KevinO
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