| Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas. While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with. I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone. I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer. I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store. I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost. |
Support is challenging when you need it. You usually have to talk to multiple people before your problem is resolved. For example, last time I got a new modem I had to be handed off twice before I got to a level where they could 'reset my registration,' and I definitely got the figurative stink eye over the phone for not renting their modem (which, is probably why it didn't "just work"). They usually try to sell you something like wiring insurance as well, and really like to emphasize the potential cost to you if they feel like they have to roll a truck. Fortunately, I've only had perhaps 3 support engagements (1 truck) in that 15+ years. Otherwise I'd be a lot less satisfied.
I'm hopeful that the various fiber providers 'coming soon to my area' will help with this. AT&T is here but not cheaper - they force you to rent their equipment - and I don't want to be an AT&T customer. At the very least it might stop Cox from raising rates $3-$6 a year.