Hi folks,
I live in Manchester, CT and have been a Cox subscriber now for going on something like 8 years I think at the same residence. I've had a few problems when I first moved into the current house but for at least the last 6 or so years, I'm happy to say I've had rock solid performance. I am currently on the Cox Premier package (150/10), and I recently (Dec 17th) swapped out the modem for a new Netgear CM600.
Last Monday, January 16th, in the evening, I started experiencing severe slowdowns browsing, videos that would continually buffer or downgrade quality, and timeouts/errors connecting to sites. A few runs on speedtests showed widely varying download/upload speeds (going down to almost 1mbps down and even failing a few speedtests). A few intermittent pings showed approximately 25% packetloss as well. This continued in the evening - I swapped out the router I was using for another, and the issue persisted that evening.
I contacted Cox via Twitter. They checked the modem's logs and, I quote, "there are issues with the downstream signal as well as the packetloss showing reaching it." They asked me if there was any splitters on the line and to remove those if there were. There was indeed one splitter which has been there as long as I've been with Cox but I obliged and went ahead and removed it the next evening, Tuesday night. Before removing it, I confirmed that my connection was back to working 100% as normal. I checked downstream signal levels before removing the splitter and they were around -12.2 dBmV. Post splitter removal, they did improve to average around -5.2 dBmV.
My connection continued working normally - no real way for me to prove the splitter had anything to do with it. Last night, Sunday January 22nd, I started experiencing the exact same issue. Whenever it happened, it was also accompanied by a T3 time-out error in the modem logs. It was brief last night, and stopped again around 10.30pm or so.
I contacted Cox again - they are now insisting that there is some connection problem on my end somewhere and have asked me to check all pins, connections, etc. They again said my downstream power levels were of concern (they are still around -5.2 dBmV and based on the COX HSI FAQ here, that should be well within specifications.)
I have a hard time believing this and I did check everything last time around when I removed the splitter, especially considering the modem is getting the T3 errors. Cox is not acknowledging the T3 errors and is trying to point at a connection between the modem and my router and have asked me to do more tests when I see the errors happen.
I'm a little frustrated. The cynic in me says that my connection will be fine until next Sunday - and I'm guessing this is a peaktime for everyone to be online or something to be happening around then. The time before that was Martin Luther King day - another day I'm guessing a lot of folks were home. I could be completely wrong of course.
Can any of the Cox techs here help? Or is this really an issue somewhere in my house that has only decided to happen twice in the last week after being solid for years? Wouldn't an issue on my end happen a bit more often? I use my connection fairly extensively every evening when I am at home.
Thanks.
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