Am 22. May, 2007 schwätzte David so:

> Does anyone have/use Cox's business broadband package for home use?  Any
> pros/cons?

I have had a business connection from Cox for several years.

It's mostly reliable, except when they intentionally take it down.

They now have 24/7 support. I haven't had any complaints about using
GNU/Linux. I mostly haven't given them the opportunity to complain, which
has probably helped.

They've had at least one very clueful person working for them in the past.

You can mostly run whatever you want ( check limitations. I'm certain the
contract forbids illegal stuff and SPAM, but might also forbid IRC daemons
and some other stuff ). I have run web, mail and dns servers off my cox
business connection.

You can get static IPs, but I wonder if they actually understand that
static IPs aren't supposed to change. They've changed them on me a few
times ( a friend has a home connection with a dynamic IP that hasn't
changed in years ). Once they called and left a message that a service
truck would be in the area a couple of days later. Apparently I was
expected to know that meant they were changing my IPs on me. That was back
when they were having outages all the time, so I figured the message was
warning me of a planned outage.

The next time they changed my IPs they didn't realize they'd done so. They
snagged the block I was on without letting me know they'd be changing.
They didn't realize they'd snagged a block of IPs that were being used.
They wouldn't give me my IPs back, so I had several days of problems as
DNS caught up.

The last time they changed my IPs they actually let me know they were
changing the IPs on me. I was able to prepare my boxen ( remotely as I
wasn't home ) for the changes. They started the change early and I wasn't
quite ready for the changeover, but after the change they were still
accepting traffic to the old gateway from my box. That was great as I
could still get back to my boxen and finish setting up for the new
network.

They still refuse to consider giving any more than 72 hours notice for IP
changes, which is really annoying. If I were on vacation my network could
be down due to my not knowing about the change. The last time I barely got
to it and had to work remotely :(. They also think that DNS changes will
happen everywhere in 2 days. They won't accept that some companies cache
longer than what is set in DNS even though Cox is one of the companies
that used to cache DNS entries for a couple of weeks.

This all boils down to: be prepared to change your networking on a moments
notice.

The business services group refuses to use email to correspond with
customers. They insist the only way to contact us about service issues is
via phone.

For the last couple of years the connection has been reliable other than
the IP issues.

The salesdroids seem to only get paid if you sign a new contract, so don't
expect improvements without having to sign new contracts. Do expect them
to try to shove a new contract on you once in a while.

I also have a DSL connection using Deru as the ISP. The connection has
mostly been stable. There have been a couple of problems and Deru has
always taken care of them almost immediately. Deru also lets me run
whatever I want. Deru actively supports GNU/Linux setups. I've gotten
direct support from the owners because they were working the support
queue. One of the owners sometimes participates on the PLUG list. Maybe
we'll someday get a presentation from him :)[0]

Deru is locally owned and operated by people who know what they're doing,
but it does require giving some money to qworst :(.

I recommend DSL with Deru ( or one of the other locally owned ISPs that
supports GNU/Linux ) over Cox business services unless the DSL connection
available can't meet your needs.

See the list archives for reviews of other ISPs. Several have gotten
recommendations on the list. Several openly support GNU/Linux and *BSD.

[0] JLF bait to see if Darin's paying attention ;-).

ciao,

der.hans
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