Cox (coaxial) is the only real viable ISP for me, in southern California, in a neighborhood built 25 years ago. Nobody wants to lay fiber in the neighborhood. A neighborhood with nearly 2,000 houses. If Cox wasn't around... we'd probably all have fios. I had faster, cheaper fiber a decade ago at my house in no-name Virginia city and while living aboard a few years in asia. So frustrating.
Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
121–130 of 196 posts
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#122Article is from 2020, when there was a big load increase from WFH. They way HFC (cable internet) works you would have to cap upload speed for everyone on the network, as it uses time multiplexing for uploads.
This isn't true, they could create a new config with the lower upload speed and only push it to the offenders modems.
No different than when they change their speed plans and roll out new tiers.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. A Google PM got me on a call and asked me if I wanted 20 gigabit for $200 a month the other day. No restrictions, I could run my business off my $70 if I really wanted to. I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.
I pay $50 for 10 gigabits from Sonic. I don’t abuse it by deliberately running a speed test 24/7 or anything like that. I do use it for anything I want, at any time, without pausing to consider how much data it takes. Launch a NAS backup at 2PM on a weekday? Stream 4K video on 2 TVs at the same time? Download a mass of software updates? Without a second’s hesitation. The CEO is on record being very explicit that they…
Absolutely amazing ISP. A while back my power went out. About three minutes later I got a text message (not from PG&E!) but from Sonic: (something like ..) "We noticed your connection went down and are running automated diagnostics." a few minutes later I got another text message which informed me that other nearby hardware they operate has lost power so they presume that my building has also lost power. Just a delightful experience.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#124a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month "Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.
I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet…
40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sonic is still in business? Had DSL with them 20 years ago.
They are so very still in business.
I see they are still a tiny regional provider in Santa Clara county, Santa Rosa, and LA. Had them when I lived next to eBay HQ ~15 years ago. https://bestneighborhood.org/sonic-availability/
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet…
> I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit. I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to misl…
> Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt.
Interpret. Words mean things, you know.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed. The internet…
40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more
I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.
HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.
Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.
Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.
NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.
For as long as you'd pay the phone bill plus isp sub.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too. Among them the typical ratio is ~32 PON users for the given "base rate" PON standard, similar to a typical ~20-50 for coax at a given DOCSIS standard. Both have better/worse examples (particularly early gigabit PON deployments were 64) but FTTH has rarely been about getting…
An actual Google PM called me up the other day trying to upsell me to $200 a month 20 gigabit. Said they’d give me a router but I’m free to hook whatever I want to the fiber, saturate it as much as I want, no worries. They must have a lot of extra bandwidth if this is a service they’re offering in my neighborhood.
Google is sadly known for doing cool proof-of-concept stuff with no regard for profitability, and then axing it when the hype is over.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.
I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".
3G speeds can technically mean as low as 256kbps so it would in fact be literally unlimited since it’s not that much data total even running 24/7.