Well, not exactly bad press, but some negative mentions in a popular podcast. Specifically, the Security Now podcast on the TWIT network, featuring Steve Gibson.
The weekly podcast features Steve transmitting on Skype via Cox HSI, I believe from Orange County, to Leo Laporte's TWIT studios in Petaluma. For the past 10 years, Steve has used dedicated T1 lines for this, with essentially perfect performance, but that service was recently discontinued, and he now uses Cox HSI. Since that change occurred, Steve's audio has suffered from dropouts. Steve and Leo discussed the problem at the end of the most recent episode, and Leo said Steve's audio was by far the worst of all the Skype hosts on his network. Steve's explanation is that it's not a speed or bandwidth issue, or a problem at his end, but dropped packets, and he can't do anything about that.
Given the large number of listeners to this podcast, I would suggest that Cox might want to proactively seek out a solution to this problem, if there is one, rather than have the issue persist week after week. Steve is not specifically blaming Cox because he doesn't know where the packet loss occurs, but perhaps Cox could determine that. I will say, as a regular listener, that the problem is consistent and persistent since the switch to Cox occurred, which suggests to me that the problem might be something glitchy fairly close to Steve, and therefore possibly easily fixable. Steve mentioned that he hears similar dropouts in the audio coming back to him from Petaluma, so the issue apparently is bi-directional.
The most recent discussion of this can be seen on Security Now episode 522 on Youtube from 1:53:50 to 2:00:36.
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