Tag Archives: Cox
And here we go
it begins. Everyone knows that cable / Internet companies are shady, shifty organizations whose disgusting practices (did I mention their disgusting practices?) have made them the most despised companies in America, among all industries. That means if you took the worst companies from every industry; cars, sandwiches, grocery stores, clothing manufacturers, everything, and then chose the worst of those, cable / Internet companies would still be on top of the list. They are monopolies that do everything in their power to stifle competition and make you pay for it. I always have to emit a disdainful sneer when they tell me how fast their service is, yet limit how much I can use it.
On the other hand, I’ve always been relatively happy with Cox Communications, who was my provider when I lived in Las Vegas, and is again now that I am here in Irvine. They always tended to keep out of my business, and while the other cable companies were wallowing in a swere of poor cutsomer service and poor performace, Cox just trudged along.
Now, however, it appears they are becoming emboldened, and I suspect that is because of the appointment of Ajit Pai as head of the FCC, which is the worst news that could happen in this domain. When Tom Wheeler, a former cable company lobbyist, was appointed, everyone thought it would be the end of net neutrality, however he happily surprised us all. I suspect we will not be so lucky with Pai in place, and if this email from Cox is anything to go by, we could be in some real trouble.
Note the email states they will automatically charge for additional 50GB blocks, something my cel phone provider does as well, and provides what was supposed to be an evaluation of my Internet usage but shows a bunch of zeros instead. I wonder if that was deliberate, or a simple oversight. At least they try to assure me that I shouldn’t have any problems with this based on past usage, although I am a heavy user of Steam (although not so much a heavy downloader).
I’ll just leave it here for you to read in fear, and hope we can fix the incoming storm that is sure to happen.
Uh Oh
Cox giveth, and Cox taketh away
I recieved an email from Cox telling me they had just given me ’10x more cloud storage,’ for a total of 50GB. I didn’t know I had cloud storage from them at all, but apparently I did and now I have more! Of course, my OneDrive account gives me one terabyte, which is 1000GB, while Google Drive provides 15GB to start, so 50GB is a pretty good amount, a somewhat middle ground of storage space. Either way, I was grateful they were going to up my quota which I never knew I had in the first place.
Here’s the email they sent. Looks pretty good!
Look what I got!
I suspect many of you got the same thing. You will find at the end of this post an email from Cox claiming they have just doubled my Internet speeds up to 50 Mbps. I don’t even have to do anything!
That’s very nice of them. However I’d like to make a couple of points about this email; first, I tested my connection on Speedtest (remember that?), and I pulled about 27 up and (amazingly) 16 down with a ping of 36, which is good, not great. My national grade is a B+ and my regional grade A-, however subsequent tests to Mojave were slower while Las Vegas was faster, as expected.
However, the email has some important word choices in it. First, it says “up to” 50Mbps, and the fact is you never get the max speed advertised as that’s only a theoretical based on ideal network conditions which never exist. It also mentions at the bottom of the email you should use what’s known as a DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0 compliant modem, and they’re right. If you’ve been using the same modem for more than a year or so, you might want to call up and see if they’ll upgrade you.
