This message is for Cox. Hopefully someone will read it and be able to implement change, for the sake of the people in my neighborhood (or city?) who are unfortunate enough to be stuck with Cox.
I have AT&T U-Verse (18mb/s VDSL), and had decided being charged as much as I have been for 18mb/s down was somewhat unacceptable. Cox had been unreliable in my area a few years ago, so I switched to AT&T immediately when U-Verse became available. Thinking Cox had some time to improve the network, I decided to see how things are currently. Contextual: my family is big into Rocket League on the PS4, and it's been perfect over AT&T's network. I enjoy some Dota 2 as well.
I ordered Cox's 100mb/s package, and the installation was completed on 8/4. The technician warned me once all the LEDs were blinking and service was up that our neighborhood (and in fact most of the city I live in) is pretty congested. Great.
Reluctantly, at this point, I moved my router's WAN cable over to the cable modem. Speed tests reported about 25mb/s downstream. Things seemed almost acceptable until that night's Rocket League sesh. Rubber banding like crazy, goals being scored without our knowledge, all sorts of bad. I ran some pings from my PC, and sure enough, there is a huge amount of jitter in the latency between here and anything else on the Internet. Here are a small sampling of pings included with the end result.
First up, the gateway my router WAN picked up via DHCP.:
Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=28ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=53ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=27ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=582ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=6ms TTL=254Reply from 98.178.128.1: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=254 Ping statistics for 98.178.128.1: Packets: Sent = 279, Received = 279, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 6ms, Maximum = 582ms, Average = 16ms
Here's Google:
Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=84ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=147ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=84ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=83ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=752ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=1468ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=56Reply from 74.125.227.197: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=56 Ping statistics for 74.125.227.197: Packets: Sent = 858, Received = 858, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 79ms, Maximum = 1468ms, Average = 92ms
To one of Valve's game servers:
Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=84ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=87ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=81ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=86ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=764ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=1504ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=96ms TTL=55Reply from 162.254.199.170: bytes=32 time=78ms TTL=55 Ping statistics for 162.254.199.170: Packets: Sent = 976, Received = 976, Lost = 0 (0% loss),Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 69ms, Maximum = 1504ms, Average = 88ms
I called Cox to cancel service, because I didn't feel like babysitting Cox through resolving this, and I doubted their ability to resolve it based on not only what the technician told me during installation, but also from prior experience with their service. The person I spoke with asked me to let them attempt to resolve the problem first, and said I wouldn't be charged for service from the installation date until the next Saturday. I said that'd be fine and gave them a chance to resolve the problem. Meanwhile, I reconnected the router's WAN to my AT&T RG.
A technician came last Thursday and installed a splitter directly before the modem to bring the levels down a bit, but the problem persisted. He then somehow ran speed tests from the pedestal outside, and said the speed tests were inconsistent there as well. He said that he would refer the ticket to the outside plant guys, and that he had seen this sort of thing when amplifiers get flaky. He said I would probably not hear back on the results of that referral, but to check things on Saturday.
I didn't reconnect to the cable modem until last night. Still some rubber banding in Rocket League, and pings were inconsistent, but it didn't seem quite as bad as before. Today, the latency swings were absolutely terrible, and the extended ping results above are from this afternoon.
I called Cox tech support to see if anything stuck out. Tier 1 support found that my modem was not provisioned for DOCSIS 3.0, and corrected that. Subsequent speed tests were around 60mb/s. Still not 100, but that wasn't my main concern. The tier 1 technician wasn't capable of talking to me about latency, so I was pushed to tier 2. That ticket number was 2861846. The person in tier 2 asked me to wait a moment while they "moved to another screen" and hung up on me. I called back, spoke with tier 2 again, and the person I spoke with steadfastly refused to do anything with me because the modem's signal levels were fine. He said I could talk to a supervisor, and I did. The supervisor wanted to send a tech to my house again, but I simply do not have the time to keep maintaining availability for field techs, and asked him to just have them investigate at the ped. He said they could not do that, and I asked him to cancel the service, which he scheduled for tomorrow morning.
So ends my tale; see you guys in another few years?
--
"No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light."
- RFC 1925
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