I wish I had a viable alternative...I'm sure we all do. I won't list the reasons, they are too numerous and really there's no point; they've got me by the short and curlys. After reading the previous thread about e-mail, I thought I might share some of my experience and what I've done to leverage things in my direction.
<br><br><ol><li>E-Mail - Currently I ONLY use COX as a smarthost for smartmontools...other than when their mail server is down (somewhat common) it has never blocked this traffic...and the occasional email to &quot;Customer Service&quot;
<br></li><li>Cox customer service Tier1 reps cannot do much, but they *CAN* give you 1 day&#39;s service credit at their discretion</li><li>On any given day, at least one of the following services will be unavailable for various reasons. (DNS, E-Mail, DHCP for the Cable Modem)
</li><li>Unfortunately for COX, I work some pretty unusual hours (or at least as far as they&#39;ll ever know)</li></ol>Knowing the above information, we type out a laundry list of complaint emails, interspersed with variables for date, time etc...With a little bit of monitoring magic, we watch our services 24/7 and at a random time every day we &quot;summarize&quot; (by we I mean 
crontab.hourly + bash + file containing next &quot;complaint time&quot;) the various issues from the past day and politely request a credit for the past days service.<br><br>For the first two years of living in my house, I think I paid ~$12/month for my cable modem.
<br><br>After my company started paying, I stopped caring and gave up the pursuit.<br><br>Another item of interest: COX pushes a config to your modem via TFTP which will lower your throughput during business hours...I pay for the 9mbit/1mbit service. I have seen config caps as low as 512k/128k. I&#39;ve read my EULA very closely, and nowhere in there does it say anything against keeping a copy of an &quot;optimal&quot; config and then pushing it to your modem every time another party makes a change...its their config after all. I&#39;m not sure of the feasibility with newer modems, but on the older Surfboards its relatively trivial. A quick google of: surfboard tftp docsis should get you on your way.
<br><br>Cheers.<br><br>-- <br>&quot;A man is defined by the questions that he asks; and the way he goes about finding the answers to those questions is the way he goes through life.&quot;<br>