<i>a 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</i><p>"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.
Cox 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.<p>Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn't offered any more". So they tried to charge me an extra $15/month for <i>half</i> the speed I was getting before. I switched to a local wireless ISP that ended up being even more expensive for even slower service -- but at least they weren't liars and when I had a problem I could talk directly with the owner if it wasn't sorted (and no data caps).
Needs (2020). They may or may not still be doing this, but this exact article was already on HN at the time:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460868">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460868</a>
"Heavy" use is just using what they pay for. If they can't guarantee that they should sell a lesser tier of service. Otherwise this is just fraud.
Story was reported on in 2020, during the peak of the lockdowns as well.<p>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).
The 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.<p>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).<p>There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).<p>Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.<p>Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.<p>The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.
Went and looked at some FCC maps to fantasize about having ISP competition after reading, and it turns out <i>North Dakota</i> has the best fiber coverage in the US, followed by <i>South Dakota</i>. I assume it's a combination of government subsidies and the prevalence of telephone co-ops out there, but very interesting nonetheless.<p>FCC Map - <a href="https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=dec2023&zoom=4.19&vlon=-101.240438&vlat=37.735850&br=r&speed=1000_100&tech=3" rel="nofollow">https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=...</a><p>Vice article - <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-best-internet-in-the-united-states/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-bes...</a><p>New America article - <a href="https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadband-map/how-did-north-dakota-become-the-crown-jewel-of-the-internet-in-the-midwest/" rel="nofollow">https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadba...</a>
Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas.<p>While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.<p>I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.<p>I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.<p>I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.<p>I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.
Cox in general is horrible. Their caps are 1.25TB, even on 1 and 2 Gigabit connections.<p>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.<p>Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...
The wholesale price of bandwidth is so low, I can't really understand this as anything other than BOFH-esqe behavior by the network planners, but maybe there is some path to a poorly executed attempt to eventually shakedown customers. Beyond the transit fees, its hard to imagine them struggling to backhaul with modern fiber optic data rates and the cable industry has always been a leader in fiber backhaul. Beyond all that, the protocols will almost certainly do the right thing.<p>Further, having a ton of eyeballs pulling downstream gives Cox a ton of leverage in negotiating settlement-free peering that for instance a pure wholesale carrier would not have. Cox is also a carrier, so the eyeballs are valuable beyond just their subscription fees.
with the ftc finally going after companies lately i really hope they go after these companies who make up entirely new meanings for words.<p>for example, it’s crazy to me that we allowed companies to redefine “unlimited” to mean “limited”.<p>when people pontificate on how we seem to be heading towards dangerous levels of low trust society—this is a great place to start. few things reach as many people as marketing. we can’t trust so much of what we’re being sold. that’s not good, at all.
They always have the choice to change provihahahahahhaha.<p>I am kidding, Cox is probably their only choice. They better write a letter to apologize as a neighborhood for their bad behavior.
Meanwhile billions and lofty promises don’t translate to benefits for real people.<p><a href="https://www.atr.org/senators-demand-bead-program-accountability-from-harris/" rel="nofollow">https://www.atr.org/senators-demand-bead-program-accountabil...</a><p><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/06/26/statement-from-vice-president-kamala-harris-on-new-administration-actions-to-increase-access-to-affordable-high-speed-internet/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...</a><p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kamala-harris-announces-plan-expand-internet-access-7hozc" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/kamala-harris-announces-plan-...</a>
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I could only dream of having 10mbps upload... we are still stuck on DSL here, I am lucky to get close to 1mb upload, not enough to even watch my home camera feed reliably, especially with audio on.
Article is from 2020, when there was a big load increase from WFH.<p>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.
A reminder of why we are getting FTC broadband labels: <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels" rel="nofollow">https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels</a>
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.
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man, as much as I hate spectrum, I will say, as much as I want to pay them for bandwidth and speed they’ll give me what I want, and sometimes even more. YMMV of course. imho this is why net neutrality should be a thing.
We only have unlimited access on France but the speed is never guaranteed. It is always "up to ..." and usually asymmetric.<p>I have a 2.5 Gbps link which I would never saturate continuously no matter what because I have generic equipment at home (despite self-hosting a lot).<p>I tried a few times to saturate it and whatever I managed to pull was never slow. This is probably because the ISPs allocate some realistic amount of people to the group of people who use the 10 Gbps provided to that group.
As unfortunate as it is, ISPs are really in the business of scamming and monopolizing the market, lest we talk about how ISPs robbed nationwide fiber from us. ISPs dont want to charge for usage, because then they wouldnt get their ransom, but since they scam average users, those who put their claims to the test are punished.
Privatizing infrastructure clearly isn't working. It's time to nationalize. Cox is basically a mafia at this point, able to sell "service" and then threaten you to use the service in some arbitrary way, but keep paying btw or you get nothing.
I get 250 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload on Spectrum (Charter Communications) in semi-rural Texas for $60/month. (I'm itching to switch to GVEC.) Recently, I had Google Fiber 2 Gbps symmetric with an option for 5 and 8 Gbps with a trial for 20 Gbps.
I posted this on Reddit yesterday and I think it applies here<p>"If your ISP isnt in the business of servicing internet, they should rethink their business model"
I remember when we got Cox “Fiber” that wasn’t fiber at all. This company is absolute trash.<p><a href="https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out-for-powered-by-fiber-ad-claim" rel="nofollow">https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out...</a><p><a href="https://www.cox.com/residential/internet.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cox.com/residential/internet.html</a>
A year ago, I had fast Cox internet for $70 per month. I moved a mile away, and Cox wanted at least $233 for any connection at any speed because AT&T was not a competitor in that neighborhood. I said no and relied on 5G until AT&T moved in a few months later with the $70 market rate. When business people take control of companies from engineers, we get enshittification. Cox has somehow managed to make me nostalgic for the enshittification phase, which has morphed into this logjammin phase where no one even pretends to be competent enough to fix the cable.
this isn't going to be fully effective until they name and shame.<p>little popups (like viasat did) that say something like "your internet will continue to suck until your neighbor at $address stops torrenting the 100gb h0rse archive"<p>and then they can get extra fees for "anonymous" as well as "unlimited"...