After having dealt with COX Business San Diego for over a month on this issue without resolve, I thought I would get some opinions here (possibly to help COX figure it out).
It started a couple of months ago. As an IT person, I keep many gadgets on my desktop. One is a ping monitor that monitors ping times to various hosts (I use 3 or 4 different DNS servers). All of the sudden, instead of 10-40ms ping times, I was getting large sweeps of up to 1000ms and lost pings. I reset my cable modem and the problem went away. FOR A WHILE...
More and more frequently, I started having the same problem. All DNS server ping times would be extremely long and packet loss would be 10% or more. Power cycling the cable modem would always fix it. These last few weeks, it happens almost every day. I've called CBS (I have residential business SOHO service), and they've checked this and that remotely. Once, they confirmed others on my node appeared to have high latency also. A couple of times, they have sent out a tech to troubleshoot, but of course, when the tech arrives, the internet is working normally. The original Cisco modem was replaced with a Moto 6180, but same symptoms, so I doubt it's the modem.
A symptom of the problem is a bit weird...when the latency is high and there is packet loss, using more download bandwidth causes the latency to improve greatly. Stop the download (stream video, VOIP call, etc.) and the high latency immediately returns. On a VOIP call once to COX during the problem, I could hear him perfectly (downstream) but he said I was very choppy (upstream).
Last service tech call, the tech was a higher level tech. He was in charge of a recent recable in our neighborhood, and knew everything about our area. It hooked up his laptop and checked everything. Signal levels are perfect. No sign of problems.
Last couple of days, even during "normal" periods when ping time are good, we've been getting messages from various devices that our connection was too slow (amazon instant video thru TV and downloading Office 365 via PC early in the morning). After doing about a dozen tests at speedtest.net, it was showing the speedtest results were very slow down, and superfast up. Down would be 2-5 and up would be 15-25. We have 25/5. The graph that speedtest.net shows during the test would be peaked for the first half the graph, then, about in the middle, would drop to the bottom for the rest of the test. Every once in a while, the speedtest would show normal, but mostly would be superfast for half then drop to practically nothing. I tried these tests on 4 different PC's, wired and wireless in my house. I also connected my laptop directly to my cable modem, reset everything, and ran the speedtest with similar results.
I'll probably try calling them again this morning, but am looking for tips, clues and help on what the problem could be. This has been a long, on-going issue and I hope I haven't left anything out, but if something above sounds incomplete, I'd be happy to fill in any blanks!
Thanks.
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