interesting fix for cox hsi

I've seen alot of discussion regarding consumer broadband in the valley, I thought I'd share with everyone how I've got everything running.

I was having severe problems with upload traffic using a retail motorola surfboard (4400u series?), I got a tech to come out and after fooling around he suggested we try a different modem, low and behold using the toshiba PCX2200u the latency to my first hop is now ~10-20ms consistantly and I can now upload closer to the real upload cap without getting unbearable amounts of choke and packet loss. I'm now renting the toshiba modem and can actually run these modems side by side (note: the headend nodes for mesa and gilbert arent tracking cable modem mac addresses, so basicly you can plug any cable modem into a cox cable run with uncapped frequencies and get online, for now) and can actually see a huge improvment between the modems which are "identical". I'm guessing either the toshbia is superior or perhaps cox is purposly targeting the surfboard modems for QoS as they can be uncapped by just about anyone with the right tools.

The cable modem is ran into a nating linux box that runs dhclient (3 months without a problem), Ive got another machine running bind and dhcpd for internal computers. Note that the uploading problem didnt exist untill about a month ago when cox started "work" on stuff. Also, for the whole time I've had their service I've been able to pull at 3+ mbits, not bad for 39.95 a month.

-Kyle O'Malley