Oh pshaw, on Sat 10 Nov 2007 01:47:46p, T meant to say...

> In article > ,
> says...
>> Oh pshaw, on Fri 09 Nov 2007 11:55:04p, T meant to say...
>>
>> > In article 4>,
>> > says...
>> >> I was gone from home most of today, during which time Cox had
>> >> resolved whatever was causing their problem. At the moment,
>> >> eventhing is working fine.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > Cox is like that. Another famouse feature of Cox is frequent DNS
>> > dropouts. The net doesn't work without DNS, or at least work well.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> I guess I've lived a charmed life until now. When we moved to our new
>> house this past December we began services with Cox for cable, phone,
>> and high speed Internet. This is the very first occurrence of any
>> problem to date. I guess I can expect more problems in the future. :-(
>>
>>
>
> It all depends on where you live. For example, the cable system here
> started out as Dimension Cable and then Cox bought the whole kit and
> kaboodle. Spent a lot of money upgrading and things of that nature.
>
> Watched the @home thing go belly up then they had to scramble to roll
> out their own service which was fraught with problems.
>
> The latest is the speed upgrade they did in Rhode Island. They had to
> replace all the amplifiers and they contracted with a company that
> didn't do the job to specidification.
>
> For example, amplifiers have automatic temperature control since RF
> devices like nice, warm and stable temperatures. There are also things
> called l-pads that control signal gain. If the signal is too high/hot
> most cable modems complain loudly.
>
> It turns out the contractor didn't install either option.
>
> Curiously enough we used Cox for two VAN (Virtual Arean Network)
> circuits. One of the circuits gave us nothing but problems. It turns out
> the amplifiers in the street had been upgraded but the l-pads and temp
> control weren't turned on.
>
> When we moved about a half mile away the service was great until the
> first temperature drop below 50F. All of a sudden nothing worked.
>
> I called Cox and explained to the drone that I knew exactly what the
> problem was, and could they please get the tier-2 guys out to fix it.
>
> A couple hours later I notice one of the Cox bucket trucks down the
> street. I went down and it's one of the guys I know. He ws griping about
> having to spend all his time fixing the contractor screw-ups.
>

Interesting course of events!

In our case we had only two choices in the neighborhood we moved to. It
was either Qwest with DSL for Internet, or Cox. This appears to be true
for most areas of Phoenix and the burbs, although there are some other DSL
choices. In our old neighborhood, DSL through Qwest was our only option.
The speed (due primarily to distance from the CO, which would have been
true at the new location as well) was really lousy, as was their service
and unpredictability and outages. In general, people we knew who had Cox
had always been pretty satisfied. I've never had reason to become too
technically involved with any of these folks, although I do work in the
network area of an IT department and do have some knowledge and skills that
might be applicable.

Generally their equipment seems to be up to snuff and we've generally been
very pleased. We've had only one outage since December and it resolved in
less than two hours. It was caused by a traffic accident.

--
Wayne Boatwright

(to e-mail me direct, replace cox dot net with gmail dot com)
__________________________________________________ ____________

OK, I'm weird ! But I'm saving up to be eccentric.