I think the thing with Cox is that it really depends on what area of the
Valley you're in.  I'm near downtown Phoenix, and my next door neighbor and
I LOVE our Cox connections.  I get some crazy download speeds.  I was
downloading some Yonder Mountain String Band SHNs from an FTP server a while
ago and was getting about 380KB/sec.  :)  A friend who lives near 20th St.
and Osborn gets the same kind of speeds.  But at the same time, I used to
work with a guy who lives near Tatum and Bell and he said that in the
evening, his Cox connection is as slow as dialup.  As far as the port
blockage, I've managed to mostly work around that where I need to.  (I might
be more annoyed about that if the price wasn't so right.)  The conversion
from Excite/@Home was a little annoying, but not TOO bad, considering.  As
for stability, I've had two outages in the past 3+ years.  All in all, I
have been VERY happy with Cox since I have been with them.  Your mileage may
vary, though.

2 cents,
~Jeff

On Monday, July 29, 2002 5:10 PM, John Olson wrote:

> The more I hear about cox, the more I'm glad to suffer with 
> my sporadic
> SprintBBD service (DSL not available).  For one thing, Cox blocks a
> plethora of ports including 25 and 110 (The list on their site
> somewhere, you really have to hunt for it).  
> FWIW, Mesa has two cable systems, Cox and cableAmerica.  I 
> have a friend
> on CableAmerica's cable service and he's happy.  He's doing 
> average user
> stuff, but has a static IP, a cheap router behind his modem serving a
> few Windows boxes, and does VPN to his employer with no problems.