My Internet problems may be fixed and I owe it all to the employees of Cox communications. I have posted about my Internet connectivity issues on many occasions so much so that I am sure people are getting tired of hearing about it. I am still not for sure why things turned out the way they did but I am very happy. I signed up for Cox High Speed Internet about three months ago and have been plagued with dropped connections every few minutes. Those of you that know my family also know that we are heavy Internet users. When this started out we were using a Belkin F5D7230-4 router that we had purchased from Wal-Mart a couple years ago.
This router cost about $39.99 and was clearly on the low end of the spectrum. The Internet was dropping about every 30 to 40 minutes on this router and the only way to get it back was to reboot the modem and the router. I lived with this for about two months before finally getting so mad. I thought I should change routers before calling Cox just to make sure that it is not my equipment. In January my wife and I went to Office Depot in Moore, Oklahoma and spent $180.00 for what we thought was going to be a good router.
This router is a D-Link DIR-825 and is an “N” router with dual band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz capability. I did some research to see if it was a good product before buying it. This router had some very good reviews and seemed to be liked by many. I thought with all the positive reviews, this router would be a good choice because one of the advertised features was heavy use on multiple computers. We came home and hooked up this new router and it worked wonderfully for about two days. I was amazed at how good it worked when it was working. After about two days the drop outs started again. This time they would fix themselves after about five minutes. The dropouts became so bad that at one point it was down five minutes and came back on for about 40 seconds before going back down.
I was becoming more angry by the minute. I reluctantly called Cox technical support just knowing they were going to say it was my router. I have found that many times when you call tech support for any organization they always blame it on your equipment. Well just as I thought, they went through the troubleshooting process and within minutes came to the conclusion that it was my router. Of course I did not believe them and thought they were just “passing the buck” so they would not have to take responsibility for my issues. In my mind there was no way it could be my router because after all, I just bought a brand new $180.00 router with hundreds of positive reviews. At this point I was not only angry but indignant. In my frustration I started posting on Twitter about my persistent Internet problems. I made a point to mention Cox by name because in my mind it was their poor infrastructure that was causing my issues.
To my surprise, my Twitter posts were recognized by several Cox employees. The couple that I remember off the top of my head were Cox_Will, CoxNicky, and DonaldOhse. These employees went out of their way to contact me directly to help come to a resolution. It was Cox_Will that called me on the phone, did some tests, and had a local Cox representative contact me. I posted a story on my blog that listed my symptoms. I then sent this link to Cox_Will over Twitter. The person he put me in contact with was Debbie Chaffee from Oklahoma. They had a couple technical support people come out to my house and spent over four hours on a cold rainy evening. I really wish I could remember their names so they could get the credit they deserved. They replaced the drop line to the box on the back of my house. They installed a new cable coming from the box into the house.
They even installed a brand new white wall plate that better matched the paint in the house. They went up on the pole with some sort of tester to see if the line was good coming to our home.
They even communicated with some tech support people at a remote site using their Nextel phones.
In the end, they discovered that by pinging various servers both of my routers the latency was terrible and inconsistent. They were showing me the results going from 7 ms all the way up to 184 ms. When connected directly to my computer they were consistently less than 10 ms. It was hard for me to argue with that. Then they brought in a cheaper Linksys WRT54G2 router to try on a temporary basis.
With this router installed my Internet was working very nicely but I was still skeptical. Like I told the two gentlemen, my other router worked great for two days before dropping out again. The guy told me that he would leave their router at our house over the weekend with the instructions to give it a real workout. He said that he wanted us to put it under as much stress as we could to force a malfunction so we would have peace that it is indeed the router that was the problem. I grudgingly agreed to the terms convinced that it was going to fail before long.
Well it has been three days and I have been running multiple video streams simultaneously 24 hours a day. The Internet has not dropped even one time leaving me to admit that it was my brand new $180.00 router that was failing. I guess it is possible that I could have purchased a lemon. I am sure these routers are mass produced and there are bound to be a few that fail. This post is an attempt to fulfill a promise I made to all parties involved. That promise was to post a glowing review of Cox Communications if they could get my persistent problem resolved. I am not only doing this because I gave my word but also because they really do deserve the praise.
This company had the foresight to to put employees on Twitter and other social networking sites to monitor the keyword “Cox”. None of these people were contacts of min so they had to be searching for the word “Cox” to have stumbled on my posts of frustration. These individuals did not sit there and ignore my please but took the initiative to contact me directly. They stayed with me until the problem was fixed. I never thought that Cox was doing me wrong before, but was convinced that because I live in an older neighborhood that the infrastructure was old and frail. I knew that Cox was capable of delivering a quality service because I have many family and friends that are customers and they were very satisfied. I just wanted to give credit to them and tell them that I am very loyal to those that treat me right. I will stay with Cox and tell others how they were patient and just as persistent to get this intermittent problem resolved. Every one of them deserve a pat on the back in my eyes. Thanks Cox!