I am seriously unhappy with our cable Internet provider today. Seriously unhappy, unfortunately, there really isn’t anyone in the area who can complete with them… and they know it.
I’ve tried Century Link, and they were just horrible. I couldn’t maintain a connect and the speeds were just dismal.
My wife has been working from home for 18 weeks, or since March 23rd. Over the past few weeks, our Cox Cable Internet has started acting up. It will maintain a steady ping for about 5 minutes, then will drop for about 15 seconds, and then return to being fine.
This dropping has caused all kinds of issues with the web application testing my wife does on a daily basis. It also wrecked hell on our bi-monthly gaming night discord/roll20 connection (life in the days of COVID).
I verified that it wasn’t a local problem, as I had made some significant changes to our internal network over the past month. However, the Internal network is running fine. It’s only when pinging external addresses that have the error.
My wife has said that she wants to become a system administrator, or at least gain some more system administrator skills to help build her career. This being the case, I have been slow to jump on this issue, as I thought it would be good experience for her attempt to solve the issue. I don’t think she’s appreciated my lack of response. In my defense, I do go to work everyday, and she’s home. You kinda have to be at the location having the issue, to solve the problem… at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
So my wife has called Cox a couple of times. Once yesterday morning in the small hours of the morning when she was fighting some insomnia. Judging from her demeanor when I (finally) got up… she had let the poor sap on the other end of the phone have a large piece of her mind. She had also gotten an appointment scheduled for someone to come out.
The tech from Cox Cable come out last night and he verified that yes indeed, we do have an issue with packets dropping and noise on the line. As it turns out, within the past month, Cox has been adding new areas to their network, and they installed some equipment backwards… so they had quite a bit of noise building up on the lines. They had thought they had resolved the issue, but since we were still having problems, it doesn’t appear that was the case.
The guy escalated the issue up the chain, and they are still working the issue. My wife reports that she had a Cox vehicle parked outside the house for a while this morning, but they had not resolved the issue before moving to another location. I assume they are tracing the issue back to it’s source.
It’s now Monday, and after having the issue cause all kinds of issues for our gaming night, I called Cox back early Sunday morning. It appears that someone reported the problem as resolved on Saturday, despite the fact that they never called us to verify that the problem was indeed resolved. Then they attempted to blame the problem on the number of devices I have on my home network. Right, I’m sure that a problem with connectivity which is originating on the outside line is caused by my internal devices… /sarcasm.
So we have someone else coming out to the house on Wednesday. Hopefully this person will be less of a dickhead than which every moron closed the ticket without verifying with us that it had been resolved. That’s just piss poor customer service.
My WGU Experience 
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