COX Communications Sucks (Was: moving e-mail)

[Erich Newell]

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.


   1. 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 "Customer
   Service"
   2. Cox customer service Tier1 reps cannot do much, but they *CAN* give
   you 1 day's service credit at their discretion
   3. 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)
   4. Unfortunately for COX, I work some pretty unusual hours (or at
   least as far as they'll ever know)

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 "summarize" (by we I mean crontab.hourly + bash + file containing
next "complaint time") the various issues from the past day and politely
request a credit for the past days service.

For the first two years of living in my house, I think I paid ~$12/month for
my cable modem.

After my company started paying, I stopped caring and gave up the pursuit.

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've read my EULA very
closely, and nowhere in there does it say anything against keeping a copy of
an "optimal" config and then pushing it to your modem every time another
party makes a change...its their config after all. I'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.

Cheers.

-- 
"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."
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