Hey all. 

Nobody at cox seems to be able to figure out what's wrong with my Internet connection. 
Thought it wouldn't hurt to throw it out to you all just for giggles. 

Here's the situation
-I used to be a cable america customer.  The network in my neighborhood would drop out from under me all the time, which was the reason for my switch to cox, -however- when the connection was up, the speed was great.
-I made the switch to cox and signed up for their 256k up and down plan. 
-I have the same internal coaxial, same internal catV and hubs, just a new drop to my house on a new provider network.
-Once on the cox network, I found myself pulling a maximum of about 30-40k regardless of what site I was downloading from and regardless of the time of day.
-When I'm downloading something at these speeds, my connection behaves as though it were totally saturated.  For example, my ping times jump from ~90ms to ~2000ms.
-A cox field tech came out to my place and decided that the problem was a result of the fact that I had an older surfboard modem which could not be automatically updated by cox.
-I bought the latest-greatest modem, and like magic I was instantly getting download speeds well in excess of 256k.
-The next day, I was back to 30-40k max and have remained there ever since.
-I have reproduced these results on three different computers, one inside my network (linux), two directly connected to the cable modem (linux and XP).
-I get a full 10meg on all traffic inside my network.
-I have asked one of the two level 2 techs that have worked on this issue to verify that my connection speed is actually being throttled down to 256 and not 56.  I'm told I'm definitely at 256.
-When I use internet speed tests (toast.net, bandwidthplace.com, etc) my speeds always come back in the 256 neighborhood.
-I am not running any kind of a proxy on my network and have tried flushing all iptables rules from my router box.

Any thoughts appreciated.

regards,
--
Steven Crandell
steven.crandell@gmail.com