 Review by Pyrion 
UPDATED: 1.1 years ago
member for 6.8 years, 3339 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Poway,San Diego,CA
 $34 per month
 "Greater caps than other cable providers, stable service."
 "Tech support intelligence varies by region."
 "Cox got it right."
| Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
|
Starting with a bit of a history lesson:
I used to be a customer of Cox@Home, San Diego area. The technical support and customer service was flawless, they had the line up and running within two days of ordering it, never had a problem with the tech support guys on the local number (although the Excite@Home folks were a different story). Had that for nearly five years. Then Excite@Home flopped and Cox was forced into the conversion state, early 2002. They successfully pulled that off, at least in my area, and now I'm using Cox HSI.
First off, the good points, and there's a lot of them so I'll name the major ones:
1. The conversion was flawless. I was seriously expecting problems converting over from Cox@Home to Cox HSI because so many other people (on the DSLR Cox HSI & Friends board) were having issues with it. No issues here. Typed in the conversion info the day it came in, and waited for the end of January, and all was good.
2. The connection has been rock-solid since I got it, with only one outage since the conversion that has lasted for longer than fifteen minutes. That's par for the course considering my experience with Cox@Home, which had about the same overall uptime. Calling tech support to report that outage resulted in a three-way conversation with a tier 2 guy and a Network Operations Center guy, who pinpointed the problem on their end and got it fixed five minutes after the call.
3. 3000/256 service, with no download limit. Mind you, I'm not a P2P nut, as most of the junk found on those networks consists of cruddy 128kbps CBR mp3s (when you have a stereo system capable of very low frequency output, 128kbps just doesn't cut it). Traceroutes and persistant pings to different hosts have yielded good results on the mass majority of occasions, but just to give an example, here's a traceroute from my line to DSL Reports:
C:\>tracert www.dslreports.com
Tracing route to dslreports.com [209.123.109.175]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 70 ms 50 ms 60 ms ip68-8-208-1.sd.sd.cox.net [68.8.208.1]
2 80 ms 60 ms 90 ms 68.6.9.225
3 150 ms 50 ms 61 ms 68.6.8.58
4 160 ms 70 ms 70 ms fed1dsrc02-gew0303.rd.sd.cox.net [68.6.8.14]
5 71 ms 50 ms 80 ms fed1bbrc02-pos0101.rd.sd.cox.net [68.1.0.206]
6 90 ms 50 ms 71 ms fed1bbrc01-pos0100.rd.sd.cox.net [68.1.0.202]
7 70 ms 50 ms 60 ms rsmtbbrc01-pos0102.rd.oc.cox.net [68.1.0.186]
8 120 ms 90 ms 90 ms POS4-0.hsipaccess2.Tustin1.Level3.net [65.59.168
.1]
9 50 ms 70 ms 90 ms so-2-0-0.mpls2.Tustin1.level3.net [209.244.27.14
5]
10 91 ms 90 ms 50 ms so-3-0-0.mp2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.1.130]
11 90 ms 71 ms 90 ms gigabitethernet5-1.core1.SanJose1.Level3.net [64
.159.2.101]
12 80 ms 90 ms 71 ms pos7-0.edge1.paix-sjo1.Level3.net [209.245.146.1
82]
13 120 ms 70 ms 70 ms sntcca2lce1.wcg.net [209.245.146.174]
14 90 ms 90 ms 70 ms sntcca2lce1-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.210.177]
15 140 ms 90 ms 100 ms chcgil1wcx3-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.240.93]
16 230 ms 90 ms 90 ms nycmny2wcx3-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.240.38]
17 170 ms 100 ms 130 ms nycmnyhlce1-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.87.110]
18 170 ms 130 ms 111 ms nycmny2lce1-netaccess-atm.wcg.net [64.200.86.150
]
19 110 ms 151 ms 90 ms a9-0-1165.msfc1.oct.nac.net [209.123.11.10]
20 161 ms 150 ms 160 ms www.dslreports.com [209.123.109.175]
Trace complete.
This gets to one of the bad points: limited peering. Simply put, Cox HSI doesn't have as many peering points as Excite@Home did, so the connection quality lasts only as long as their internal network in most cases. I expect this to improve, but it's nothing the techs can do anything about other than continue to recommend to their bean counters that they need to get more peering points.
Now, the bad points:
1. A 50K/sec USENET cap. Not a huge gripe by any means, but my gripes are few and far between with the service that it qualifies as one.  Anyone that spends time downloading binaries off of USENET newsgroups knows how frustrating it is to be getting service at a fraction of what is advertised. As far as Cox is concerned, USENET is a low-priority service.
2. Tech support varies by intelligence by region. San Diego is pretty good. But that doesn't mean much to you unless you live in San Diego County. Apparently they're not so intelligent in the rest of the country. This is something Cox needs to fix, but it may be an issue more typical of the regions involved.
3. Lack of peering points, which I already got to.
So overall:
Cox got it right, for the most part. They had to build up a network in maybe a quarter of the time they would've hoped for and they got it right.
UPDATE:
Cox has many more peering points now, and the network itself is seemingly lagless. Okay, not true, there's some latency, but it's mostly double-digit under 50ms and my pings are better than they ever were with Cox@Home.
Tracing route to dslreports.com [209.123.109.175]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 11 ms 11 ms 10 ms 10.8.219.1
2 15 ms 22 ms 8 ms pwy1aggr01-vlncmt01.sd.sd.cox.net [68.6.9.225]
3 12 ms 14 ms 12 ms fed1sysr01-gex1504.sd.sd.cox.net [68.6.8.58]
4 13 ms 64 ms 13 ms fed1dsrc02-gex0303.sd.sd.cox.net [68.6.8.14]
5 12 ms 11 ms 12 ms fed1bbrc02-pos0101.rd.sd.cox.net [68.1.0.206]
6 23 ms 25 ms 21 ms chndbbrc01-pos0102.rd.ph.cox.net [68.1.0.166]
7 22 ms 21 ms 24 ms chndbbrc02-pos0100.rd.ph.cox.net [68.1.0.163]
8 40 ms 40 ms 39 ms dllsbbrc01-pos0102.rd.dl.cox.net [68.1.0.146]
9 40 ms 43 ms 43 ms dllstx9lce1-fa6-2.wcg.net [64.200.226.125]
10 45 ms 40 ms 41 ms dllstx1wcx2-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.110.81]
11 103 ms 99 ms 98 ms hrndva1wcx3-pos11-0.wcg.net [64.200.232.126]
12 129 ms 110 ms 116 ms hrndva1wcx2-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.95.73]
13 131 ms 139 ms 101 ms nycmny2wcx2-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.240.45]
14 116 ms 110 ms 102 ms nycmny2wcx3-pos10-0.wcg.net [64.200.87.230]
15 101 ms 98 ms 99 ms nycmnyhlce1-oc48.wcg.net [64.200.87.110]
16 100 ms 98 ms 101 ms nycmny2lce1-netaccess-atm.wcg.net [64.200.86.150]
17 123 ms 101 ms 98 ms 95.ge-0-0-0.gbr1.nyc.nac.net [64.21.102.5]
18 102 ms 99 ms 103 ms 1187.at-0-1-0.gbr1.oct.nac.net [209.123.11.150]
19 116 ms 102 ms 118 ms 95.gi-1-1.msfc1.oct.nac.net [64.21.102.2]
20 100 ms 114 ms 104 ms www.dslreports.com [209.123.109.175]
Trace complete.
That's the relative status of the network, as far as San Diego is concerned.
UPDATE: Cox has more peering points now and service has improved bigtime. I haven't had reason to complain once this year.
UPDATE #2: BBR, stop with this incessant "update yer isp review" nag screen BS. Thankyouverymuch. 
UPDATE #3: Cox just upgraded the lines to 4000/512. Yet more reason to endorse.
UPDATE #4: It's up to 7000/512 now. I'm nearing the point where I'll have to buy myself a new modem just to take advantage of the faster speed, mainly due to my current modem only doing half-duplex 10Base/T instead of full-duplex 100Base/T. Otherwise, same as ever. No complaints.
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