A reminder of why we are getting FTC broadband labels: https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels
Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
41–50 of 196 posts
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#42Story was reported on in 2020, during the peak of the lockdowns as well.
We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power. In return, they abuse us, they collude to make sure other ISPs do not compete against each other to justify high prices and low bandwidth, and hire lobbyists to implement/push stupid laws in various states to prevent municipal ISPs (eg, Texas).
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#43Article 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.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#44Cox in general is horrible. Their caps are 1.25TB, even on 1 and 2 Gigabit connections.
And it's not like they put you on slow speeds once you expire it, no, they charge you $10 per 50GB (!). Automatically. You cannot opt out.
Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#45Cox advertised gigabit to me. I always wanted it so I took the upsell. After six truckrolls (alternately telling me my signal was too strong -- installing attenuator, then too weak and removing it) for which I had to take a day off work every time, they eventually told me it was a mistake and my neighborhood didn't have gigabit. Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn…
Did you sue? Isn't that false advertising?
In the US you could seek recourse via your state Attorney General. You might hope the FCC would care (but they don’t).
The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#46a 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 is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.
E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like
> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.
Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#47The root cause of the problem is that copper coaxial cable tv based (DOCSIS3.0, DOCSIS3.1, etc) last mile internet infrastructure is a shared/contended access medium for many modems connected to it. It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system). There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to…
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…
Im not sure Google is GPON (or has passive splitters at all). They were very early to deployments, and their plans are always symmetrical (which doesnt make sense for any standard *PON deployment).
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you sue? Isn't that false advertising?
In the US you could seek recourse via your state Attorney General. You might hope the FCC would care (but they don’t). The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?
You can't buy the satisfaction that comes from forcing the phone company to do what you require.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#49Cox advertised gigabit to me. I always wanted it so I took the upsell. After six truckrolls (alternately telling me my signal was too strong -- installing attenuator, then too weak and removing it) for which I had to take a day off work every time, they eventually told me it was a mistake and my neighborhood didn't have gigabit. Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn…
There's a lot to be said for the better customer service and straightforward treatment. Worth the extra premium you got hosed with in the end.
Re: Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
#50Needs (2020). They may or may not still be doing this, but this exact article was already on HN at the time: