In My Holy Opinion

Ok, COX customer service officially sucks. It happened more than once that our Internet access was suspended without warning due to file sharing. It looks like a few months ago, COX implemented this stupid policy which requires them to shut off Internet access to a customer if someone (i.e. the RIAA) complains about the user sharing a particular file in violation of the file’s copyright protections.

I think this policy is especially moronic because the customer service representatives at COX are completely in the dark about this; the first time our Internet access was suspended, I was sent to an alternate web page (instead of the web site I was trying to access) that was set up by COX, stating the reason my account is suspended, the number I need to call to get it reactivated, as well as the file name of the offending file, and even the MAC address of the computer that was sharing it. So far so good. I called the number on the screen and things were up and running again within minutes (I had to “remove” the offending file). The second time around, however, I didn’t get the screen, instead I got nothing. I checked all the router settings and everything was OK (except that I was assigned a different IP address). I figured there must be something wrong with COX’s routers, so I called customer service and explained what was going on. The rep that I talked to made me go through all this bullshit of course, he wouldn’t help me unless I restarted my router and modem. I hate being treated like a fucking moron by these people. Does this guy really think I didn’t take the time to restart the router before I decided to sit through 15 min of annoying automated phone menus and elevator music? This is insane. But I wasn’t in the mood to argue, so I did what he told me to do. I explained to him several times that the reason things aren’t working is because our account might have been suspended for file sharing (since that happened before). I obviously made sure beforehand that it’s not something on our end that was causing this, so I was certain that it was either that, or their routers were misconfigured. The customer service rep had me do some more bullshit and finally told me that my router was “picking up a bad IP”.

“Yes, I KNOW!” that’s the reason I called, dammit. I was assigned a non-pulic IP address, so basically I was connected to COX’s little private “Internet” that only had one site (or no sites). And, as I had suspected, this was intentional.

Now, get this: after all this, the COX douchebag told me to CALL LINKSYS! WTF! I’ve never heard anything more stupid! As a matter of fact, I’m going to complain to COX tomorrow. I even tried to explain to the guy that the router is ASSIGNED the IP by the COX network. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE ROUTER! I’m not a fucking idiot, I didn’t somehow misconfigure it. Even if I did, he wouldn’t be able to see it, so he wouldn’t “know” that it’s picking up a “bad” IP. My God.

Anyways, enough of my rants. This wasn’t even my original topic. My original topic was that, in spite of all this, COX has really, really fast connections sometimes. I’ve never really experienced anything below 300K / sec max download speed, but the highest it’s ever gone before was 550K, or something close to that. Today (just now), COX has broken new ground with me. Take a look at the above picture. Notice anything unusual?

FUCK YEAH!

My total download speed was 900+K/sec!!! Sustained! (over 15+ min) That’s kiloBYTES, so over 7Mbps (megaBITS per second)! Their advertised max is 6Mbps, and that’s for premium accounts, I have regular. Granted this happened at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning, BUT this is WAY faster than my average connection at my datacenter, or even at work or school. COX officially kicks ass. because of this, I might not complain about the imbeciles who work there. (if they weren’t such dumbfucks, they would probably enforce bandwidth limits a little more, so this can be a good thing….)