Two odd things happened in the last week. First, I received a letter from Cox telling me that they want to upgrade me to a new modem for free...and all I'd need to do was exchange my old modem. Which is odd, because I purchased my Motorola Surfboard myself. They also failed to indicate what kind of POS modem they were going to give me in exchange for my modem.

Then I got a call from them today. They left a VM saying that they wanted to come out and check the cable in 'my area' and that they would need me to be home when the came out, so I needed to call them back to schedule a time at my convenience.

Anyone know what's up? Is cox doing some new network thing? It's odd that a letter and a phone call were the first and only things I've heard about this at all.

Almost seems like some sort of up-sell sales call.

There is something strange about it.

Paranoid take: They're going to put monitoring software or something on your modem.

Suspicious take: They don't want you using your own modem, and want to charge you more for something else.

Cynical take: They're screwed up and can't figure out who it is in your neighborhood running a disallowed service on some port or something.

Confused take: If they want to check the cable in "your area" why would they need YOU to be home, or if they need everyone in your area to be home, how can they ask everyone to call and schedule a convenient time? Wouldn't they just say "everyone needs to be home on the Xth of the month" ??

Doesn't make much sense to me either. Maybe they think your cable modem is defective and is causing errors in their system.

Ask here:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/coxhsi
Actual cox engineers monitor that forum.

I got the same letter. I ignored it but it did seem legit to me.
My guess is they are preparing to upgrade the docsis version in the area.

Thanks for the link. It looks like this has something to do with Cox going to DOCSIS 2.0

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21165776-VA-Free-Modem-Upgrade

I got the same letter. We owned our own modem. I was having a boat load of trouble with our internet cable service and having just returned from 6 weeks caring for my mom and partaking of Comcast in California, I KNEW that our cable was freaking slow. I called Cox. They asked if I had received a letter and when I said yes, they said that I needed to swap out my old modem. Because of an upgrade to the system my old modem was not working correctly.
Off I go to Cox, but without my own modem, since it was my own!!! They did want my old modem to give me the new one. That was a bit weird, but since I wasn't going to do anything with it, I really didn't care. I took home the new modem (took back our old one a couple of days later) plugged it it and WOW talk about an improvement in our internet speed :)
So NOT a hoax. It did make a difference, it still isn't great, but it is better.

What make/model is the new modem? Our service has been slow for awhile, but my (owned) cable modem supports DOCSIS 2.0.

gail Wrote:
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> I got the same letter. We owned our own modem. I
> was having a boat load of trouble with our
> internet cable service and having just returned
> from 6 weeks caring for my mom and partaking of
> Comcast in California, I KNEW that our cable was
> freaking slow. I called Cox. They asked if I had
> received a letter and when I said yes, they said
> that I needed to swap out my old modem. Because
> of an upgrade to the system my old modem was not
> working correctly.
> Off I go to Cox, but without my own modem, since
> it was my own!!! They did want my old modem to
> give me the new one. That was a bit weird, but
> since I wasn't going to do anything with it, I
> really didn't care. I took home the new modem
> (took back our old one a couple of days later)
> plugged it it and WOW talk about an improvement in
> our internet speed :)
> So NOT a hoax. It did make a difference, it
> still isn't great, but it is better.

If they've completed the fiber install in your neighborhood, I would highly suggest FIOS from Verizon.

I've had it for 3 years now, and have never had an outage of any kind, not even for just a few minutes. The previous 3 years at my current address I had Cox cable modem service, and I had outages and lagging speeds all the time.

Not only is it 100% reliable, but the latency is amazingly low, so if you are into online games, you'll be amazed by it.

I get 20/5mbps for $52,95 a month. When I did a speedtest at speakeasy.net just now, it showed 22,536 kbps down, 6,235 kbps up, to New York City.

But it's the reliability -- I've never once had any down time, in 3 years.

I did the online form for the exchange. Came via UPS, with a free return shipping label. (Which went to a recycling place up north, by the way.) Speed improved from low 10s (Mbps) to mid-upper 20s! Friend in neighborhood has cheapest FIOS, and only gets 15-16.

someone forgot to do the "Spunky take" where its a grand plan by Mohammad Atta!

I understand that if you go with FIOS Internet service, Verizon will want to put your phone on the same cable, taking it off the copper wires. I've read that some folks fight hard to keep phone service as is, but Verizon fights back. Anyone have insight on this? (I'm not technically savy on this so I hope my description of the phone service distinction was reasonably accurate.)

jcz Wrote:
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> I did the online form for the exchange. Came via
> UPS, with a free return shipping label. (Which
> went to a recycling place up north, by the way.)
> Speed improved from low 10s (Mbps) to mid-upper
> 20s! Friend in neighborhood has cheapest FIOS, and
> only gets 15-16.

What brand was the new one? Do they require you send back the old one (rather than sell it)?

Phoney Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I understand that if you go with FIOS Internet
> service, Verizon will want to put your phone on
> the same cable, taking it off the copper wires.
> I've read that some folks fight hard to keep phone
> service as is, but Verizon fights back. Anyone
> have insight on this? (I'm not technically savy
> on this so I hope my description of the phone
> service distinction was reasonably accurate.)


Yes, they do clip the copper pair at the trunk so you can never go back to copper wire phone service. I was a little reluctant to go with FIOS because of that, but the only real trade-off is that if you lose power for more than an hour or so, you lose phone service, where the old copper wire phone service was powered by a battery at the central office so that you would rarely lose phone service due to a power outage.

And if that is really a big deal for you, you can always buy an UPS and plug their UPS into that then into the wall to extend the length of time you can be without power before losing phone service.

Besides, most people do not have a basic phone that will keep working when the power goes out. Their cordless phones stop working as soon as the power goes out, anyway.

The phone service isn't noticeably different, for what that's worth.

Bob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> was a little reluctant to go with
> FIOS because of that, but the only real trade-off
> is that if you lose power for more than an hour or
> so, you lose phone service, where the old copper
> wire phone service was powered by a battery at the
> central office so that you would rarely lose phone
> service due to a power outage.

Quote
orly?
Fios service has about 4-8 hours of backup time

besides, just use a cell phone.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Gravis Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> Fios service has about 4-8 hours of backup time
>
> besides, just use a cell phone.

4 - 8 hours, whatever. My point was that there was a limitation, but it didn't really seem to be such a great limitation to actually avoid FIOS.

Maybe it's because I've had the service for almost 3 years and the battery is getting old, but I had a power outage a few months ago and my phone service went dead because the battery ran out about an hour into the outage. But I'd still recommend FIOS. The speed and extremely low latency is just amazing, and worth it.

My beef with Verizon FIOS is simple.

My wife and I had been loyal (as in >$200 a month) customers of Verizon for over five years. We closed on our new house on May 1, checked for FIOS availability on their website (and it said yes.)

I called them on April 27, was on hold for 30+ minutes, and was then told, 'Oh no, we can't come out until May 20.' They seemed under the impression that there was no FIOS service at our new house, despite the previous owners telling us they were FIOS customers. Further calls saw me bounced to an Indian call center, and on hold for an average of 20 minutes.

(BTW, I tried to arrange an online appointment back in 2002, they were a no-show. So my faith in the online appointment thingie is pretty low.)

I asked, 'OK, can you at least get us a landline set up,' to which they replied, 'No.' (Needless to say, the large number of trees in Vienna make cell phone service spotty.)

I called Cox and had service set up in under 24 hours.

i got the same msg and called and called finaly i got a cox tech with a clue and there updating the old ones with a longer battery life and new 911 software for if your with out power for long times and there mite be some kind off wireless cell phone type card in them or somthing like it so you can still call 911 when the cable lines are down

hope this helps