TLDR; Cox is not able to connect me to the internet at the speed I'm paying for.
Preface: I have been a network and systems engineer for 12 years, for small ISPS, Software/SAAS providers, cloud providers, and a large graphics company, and would consider myself senior level.
This is my last effort to try to figure out what's going on. I've spent over a year and opened multiple cases with Tier 2 support, but I was told yesterday that it can't be escalated any further.
I pay for Ultimate 300/30. I won't get into it, but that in itself is absurd. I don't need 300. Why can't these cable companies just sell me something like 30/30 or 50/30? The only way to get 30 up is through these insane tiers that are purely numbers used to sell sell sell.
Anyway, the actual speed at which data can leave my house, is indeed 30mbps. But Cox is doing something to my traffic, beyond my modem, that prevents me from actually uploading to ANYWHERE at 30mbps. I can confirm that while doing the speed test on Cox's Internet Tools site, that data is indeed egressing my firewall at 30+ mbps. That's great and works for selling big internet packages. But it's not great for real world scenarios. In fact, it's completely useless to me and negates my entire reason for buying this enormous package. I don't need to download so much, rather I need upload. I take 1080p/60fps videos and can't share them because I am unable to push them to ANY site in a reasonable time. I also connect to my home computer/network from the office quite often and moving data back and forth is awful.
Youtube, Vimeo, Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, my own datacenter for work (Level 3 Communications), my own office connection (AT&T Metro Ethernet), all can be uploaded to, at MOST 5 mbps. Typically it's more around 1-3. I think this is unacceptable. Why am I paying for this if I can't actually use it? Here's the best part: aside from Cox's speed test showing that it's fast, speedtest.net is also typically at least 20-30 mbps, also confirmed on my firewall. Not one single other thing is that fast.
I have googled, and read other forums including this one, with Cox employees/experts saying that Cox doesn't do any throttling or traffic shaping based on traffic type/port/protocol. They are either misinformed, or there is something else going on. There HAS to be some kind of traffic shaping in place (I think all companies do this anyway) that is allowing speedtest.net traffic to reach the full 30mbps but not anything else, so that Cox can always maintain deniability.
I saw someone else mention that it has to do with per-connection/stream limits, which I have also BEEN ABLE TO VERIFY. I can initiate multiple uploads to different places and can CONFIRM that the outbound throughput will continue to climb as I add more and more uploads. So regardless of it being denied elsewhere, it is ABSOLUTELY happening.
I really hope someone here can help. Sorry for the long one. Thanks all.
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