No intentions of a rant, just wanted to explain for any interested.
Quick background: 11 year customer here. I was still under the "old ultimate" plan of 150/20mb w/ 2TB cap. Exceeded cap by 103GB last month. Received $30 overage charge. Under new ultimate / when I am no longer grandfathered and forced into the new ultimate plan, that bill would have been $230 in overages. Yes $230 on top of the $99.99 monthly service.
Quicky about the overage: I was charged $30 for exceeding the cap. I called and complained. They offered a one time courtesy where they forgave the $30 overage. This put last months bill back to $99.99 for the month.
Cancellation call: I already had my new internet service installed for a few days before calling to cancel. I expected to be persuaded to be remain a customer, however I doubted I would be offered unlimited data as an option. Something I would have taken, had I not already installed new service.
One question I was asked was "What are you going to do for internet?". The question was one that sounded like I had no options. While I have severely limited options, I did have an option. Not as much throughput, but sufficient speed, unlimited data and lower latency (woohoo!) and the same price per month. A little give and take but whatever.
Offers: I was offered a TV and phone package for $159.99 a month. I could be wrong but it may have included premier internet (a downgrade). This wouldn't help my situation at all. I explained the internet connection still involved a cap and that $159.99 a month was more than $99.99 a month. Seriously, no help to me.
I was offered to upgrade to gigablast. Problem is two-fold. First it isn't available in Cleveland. Secondly, it only carries a 2TB cap, which I currently have with grandfathered Ultimate, which isn't enough for every month. If it were 2TB and unused data was treated as rollover data, I probably wouldn't have had as big of an issue.
The offers were made first, then the "What are you going to do for internet?" question was posed. At this point I stated I already had new internet and it was unlimited data. This is when the support person realized I wasn't calling to threaten disconnection, I was actually disconnecting my service. All in all took under 10 minutes to get through and cancel.
FWIW / "ranty" part: As an 11 year customer I didn't have any complaints with service, speed or price. I was a happy camper. When the data caps got enforced, I went over and got whacked at an absurd $10 per 50GB I had to do what I could to make a change. It was apparent on the forums that people were defending Cox and their practices. Many are happy to see me leave as I will "not hog up their bandwidth" or whatever their logic is, even though we live states away and have no effect on each other :). I'm not the least bit happy I had to leave.
I truly feel bad for anyone in a market with zero alternative options for broadband. I thought I was one of those people, but found what was literally my only other option. I took a hit in download speed as I'm down to 50Mbit now. However it is sufficient for my needs, I will just have to wait longer for big downloads. I was happy to pay for higher speeds as I am the impatient type. For years, I was all about speed, speed, speed. If gigablast was available, I would jump on it. However with data caps, the focus for me has shifted from how far I can go not how quickly I can get there. The emphasis shifted from speed to unlimited data.
I will not call this a win. It is a loss on both sides and for every Cox customer. Whether you think it affects you now or not you are effectively accepting an arbitrary limit on a service that never had one before. My only win is that I am officially back to my old ways: Never logging into a portal to check data usage and back to not ever worrying about it, period.
My biggest hope is that Cox will change this policy and reverse course. Once they do so, this will open Cox back up as a viable home internet option again for me. I would gladly switch back if the product and service being sold met my needs. I'm betting they won't for the next year or so. Would love to be wrong!
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