The Unrest Cure
Compassion is the basis of morality.
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As many may know, Cox Cable reported damage to a fiber cable in NOLA last Thursday, which produced an internet access outage across most of the Westbank. Following service restoration I have had endless difficulty accessing/using the internet. My provider is Cox, and our plan calls for (maximum) download speeds of 150 Mbps and upload speeds of 10 Mbps. The problem since Thursday afternoon is that my upload basically never exceeds 0.1 Mbps. Yes, 0.1. Not 1; 1/10th of 1. This makes for serious problems. Interestingly, the download remained basically at 150 Mbps while the upload cratered.
So: I contacted Cox Thursday night and they advised that I had heavy packet loss while pointing out that my modem was 7 years old. I'll admit, I had zero idea. If you asked me I would have guessed it was 3 or so years, but 7 is quite long-in-the-tooth. While they claimed they had no outages at that time Thursday night I was skeptical as my problems seemed less than coincidental to the major outage. But if Cox says it isn't their issue who am I to argue.
Friday I went out and bought a new Netgear CM1000v2 modem and Asus RT-AX82U router, hooking everything up and praying that the issue was my old modem. Surprise of surprises! It wasn't. The new modem - after contacting Cox to have them update it and connect it to my account - has WORSE download speeds than the 7 year old modem. Much worse. Per Speedtest I was getting 30 Mbps down ... and 0.1 Mbps up. This is worse than the old modem by some pace. Contacting Cox about it left their support telling me the issue was with the modem and "configuration errors" with it that Netgear would need to address. So I called Netgear after connecting my pc directly to their modem (eliminating the router from the chain) and filled them in. Netgear advised that I needed to contact Cox and have my modem "reprovisioned" while commenting that I had a high volume of t3 timeout errors in my modem log. They advised the reprovisioning would correct this.
So I call Cox (again). Their support staff tells me they will reprovision my modem (how am I to know what they did?) and following the process I reboot the modem to discover that nothing has changed. 30 Mbps down, 0.1 Mbps up. Cox tells me they will remote access my pc to see what the issue is and then I am immediately speaking a tech support guy named Charlie who says NO Cox does not need to remote access my pc and that if there was a significant outage in New Orleans odds are pretty good that my upload issues are related. Although he caveats this with the statement that he generally does tech stuff like connecting peoples wi-fi and doorbells to their wireless network, so I don't know where that leaves him in the technical arena in discussing modem issues. I'd like to think of him as some honest mole inside the Cox bureaucracy fighting for truth and the little non-technologically inclined man. He could just be getting me off his line, too.
Alright wall of text! So I hook my old modem back up just to confirm the issue with my diminished download is the new modem. After putting the 7 year old modem back into action (and calling Cox again to activate it) I find it gets 150 Mbps down ... and 0.1 Mbps up. Yes, insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting new results, but I had hopes. Anyway, I call Netgear back to discuss if my modem is faulty and since I am not entirely helpful or trusting of either Netgear or Cox at this time I do refuse to set the new modem back up so they can access it (probably the wrong call, but what is done is done). They do advise me that they will send me an email that will contain instructions on what to tell Cox Cable about my Netgear modem, which is: 1) checking my firmware version, 2) confirm it is the latest updated firmware, 3) I quote the email text from my English-as-second-language-Netgear-tech-guy:
"Please request your ISP to keep the thnigs the power range of upstream and downstream channels should be upstream: +38 to +48 downstream -7 to +7". Yeah, I don't know what "thnigs" (his spelling, not my typo) is supposed to mean or if the email lost a line of text or what. Just color me confused and reasonably irritated. Partially from this endless run around and partially from the need to call Cox back to do this to my new modem.
I'll tie this up quickly and thanks for your patience in listening to my rambling story: Is anyone else using Cox Internet finding their upload is toast since the big outage Thursday in New Orleans? Should I wait this out and assume it is a Cox issue or go ahead and spend the $$$ in having a Cox tech come over to poke my cables, obliterate my splitters, and indubitably blame something inside my house for the poor upload? And how the hell do you get 150 Mbps download speed with just about zero upload? Is that the natural result of significant packet loss? Please don't make me wait on the phone for Cox again : (
The Saints better win tomorrow. I've suffered enough grief and frustration these last 2 days *while still far less than most in SE Louisiana, obviously*
So: I contacted Cox Thursday night and they advised that I had heavy packet loss while pointing out that my modem was 7 years old. I'll admit, I had zero idea. If you asked me I would have guessed it was 3 or so years, but 7 is quite long-in-the-tooth. While they claimed they had no outages at that time Thursday night I was skeptical as my problems seemed less than coincidental to the major outage. But if Cox says it isn't their issue who am I to argue.
Friday I went out and bought a new Netgear CM1000v2 modem and Asus RT-AX82U router, hooking everything up and praying that the issue was my old modem. Surprise of surprises! It wasn't. The new modem - after contacting Cox to have them update it and connect it to my account - has WORSE download speeds than the 7 year old modem. Much worse. Per Speedtest I was getting 30 Mbps down ... and 0.1 Mbps up. This is worse than the old modem by some pace. Contacting Cox about it left their support telling me the issue was with the modem and "configuration errors" with it that Netgear would need to address. So I called Netgear after connecting my pc directly to their modem (eliminating the router from the chain) and filled them in. Netgear advised that I needed to contact Cox and have my modem "reprovisioned" while commenting that I had a high volume of t3 timeout errors in my modem log. They advised the reprovisioning would correct this.
So I call Cox (again). Their support staff tells me they will reprovision my modem (how am I to know what they did?) and following the process I reboot the modem to discover that nothing has changed. 30 Mbps down, 0.1 Mbps up. Cox tells me they will remote access my pc to see what the issue is and then I am immediately speaking a tech support guy named Charlie who says NO Cox does not need to remote access my pc and that if there was a significant outage in New Orleans odds are pretty good that my upload issues are related. Although he caveats this with the statement that he generally does tech stuff like connecting peoples wi-fi and doorbells to their wireless network, so I don't know where that leaves him in the technical arena in discussing modem issues. I'd like to think of him as some honest mole inside the Cox bureaucracy fighting for truth and the little non-technologically inclined man. He could just be getting me off his line, too.
Alright wall of text! So I hook my old modem back up just to confirm the issue with my diminished download is the new modem. After putting the 7 year old modem back into action (and calling Cox again to activate it) I find it gets 150 Mbps down ... and 0.1 Mbps up. Yes, insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting new results, but I had hopes. Anyway, I call Netgear back to discuss if my modem is faulty and since I am not entirely helpful or trusting of either Netgear or Cox at this time I do refuse to set the new modem back up so they can access it (probably the wrong call, but what is done is done). They do advise me that they will send me an email that will contain instructions on what to tell Cox Cable about my Netgear modem, which is: 1) checking my firmware version, 2) confirm it is the latest updated firmware, 3) I quote the email text from my English-as-second-language-Netgear-tech-guy:
"Please request your ISP to keep the thnigs the power range of upstream and downstream channels should be upstream: +38 to +48 downstream -7 to +7". Yeah, I don't know what "thnigs" (his spelling, not my typo) is supposed to mean or if the email lost a line of text or what. Just color me confused and reasonably irritated. Partially from this endless run around and partially from the need to call Cox back to do this to my new modem.
I'll tie this up quickly and thanks for your patience in listening to my rambling story: Is anyone else using Cox Internet finding their upload is toast since the big outage Thursday in New Orleans? Should I wait this out and assume it is a Cox issue or go ahead and spend the $$$ in having a Cox tech come over to poke my cables, obliterate my splitters, and indubitably blame something inside my house for the poor upload? And how the hell do you get 150 Mbps download speed with just about zero upload? Is that the natural result of significant packet loss? Please don't make me wait on the phone for Cox again : (
The Saints better win tomorrow. I've suffered enough grief and frustration these last 2 days *while still far less than most in SE Louisiana, obviously*
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