Why I Ditched Cox Communications In Favor Of AT&T For Internet!
Over the past 10 years, the level of customer service at Cox Communications here in Wichita, Kansas has been poor, at best, in my opinion. The final straw, came over this past weekend. On Saturday evening, my internet went out, however, I thought it would be a short outage, so went to bed thinking, it’d be fixed by morning, it was not, so I call Cox technical support; and the following is what transpired during the call.
On the call, which was placed at roughly 9:15am on Sunday morning, I explain that my internet had been down since 5pm on Saturday night. The representative tried to reach my modem, a Motorola SB6121, which he was unable to do. He immediately went into telling me that my modem was outdated and incapable of handling 150mbps, claiming the SB6121 was only capable of handling 30mbps.
I know this to be bullshit, the specs for my modem, which I bought myself about 4 1/2 years ago, says that it can handle up to 172mbps, and last time I checked, 172 was more than 150. Before the outage it had be happily delivering 137mbps down and 16-20mbps up, despite this, the rep continued to push for me to buy a new modem, not even entertaining the idea that something else might be at fault.
Anyway, fine, I just wanted to get my internet back up, so I walked out to my car to head to Best Buy to purchase one of their recommended modems, when I noticed the scene pictured above, a car had clearly left the road, driven across my front lawn and hit the cable pod, connecting my house to the main line.
I called Cox technical support back and got the damaged pod temporarily fixed to get me up and running again on Monday morning. I told the engineer about my experience with technical support, and even he said that the phone tech had lied to me, he knew the modem I had was capable of providing the speed of the Premier tier I had, I do like the Cox service techs, they don’t give you any bullshit, which I appreciate.
I was told that another team would have to come out and make a permanent fix, which they did the next day. But, instead of knocking on my door to tell me that my Internet would go down for a few minutes while they repaired the main line, they pulled the plug on my internet connection as I clicked submit [to Internet] on something I had been working on for two hours, which failed and the work was lost.
I have to accept part of the blame for that, I should have done regular draft saves, but the Internet had been so reliable before this incident; and I requested that the techs let me know before starting the fix.
A few days before this all happened, I received an Email from Cox about an “at no additional cost” offer for an upgraded modem, which I initially ignored as the SB6121 was more than capable of providing the max speeds the Premier service offered. After my experience over the weekend, I clicked on the link from the Email and it was not free, there was a $20 connection fee, plus two other options, one to buy a modem for $200 or rent a $10/month Panoramic WiFi Modem, hardly at no additional cost is it?
When I talked to a representative from the Cox customer retention department to cancel my service, I brought this Email up and he said it was a mailer sent out to everyone and was only available to customers with bundled Internet and phone, something that was not mentioned in the Email sent to me.
There are multiple other issues with Cox technical support over the years, including turning off our internet a day early when we moved to our current home five years ago, then failed to connect Internet at our new address, resulting in three days of downtime in our new home. Then, they had the gall to charge us $85 for an engineer to visit to get us online, which I did not pay, I had that removed from my bill.
Ultimately, this experience has cost Cox our business, over the 10 years we have been customers of theirs, we have paid them over $25,000 for TV and Internet services. We have switched to AT&T and their Fiber Internet 1000 tier, which provides symmetrical gigabit connectivity, something that Cox cannot compete with unless you happen to live in a brand new neighborhood, which we do not, our home is 12 years old.
I won’t say how good it is, I’ve only had AT&T installed for 27 hours, but so far, so good, we average about 850mbps down and 930mbps up, which is great for me as I do a lot of uploading of large files to various servers for my work. The amazing thing is the price, $80/month for one year, then just $90/month after the promotional period, the cost for Cox Premier (150mbps down/20mbps up) had just risen to $89.99.
AT&T included free installation and a free modem/router with wireless AC capability, now I just have one box on my desk instead of two. I’m kinda pleased that Cox tried to screw me over, as it forced me to look into alternatives. Last time I looked, five years ago, the fastest speed AT&T offered was 50mbps down and incredibly restrictive data caps, something that I don’t need to worry about now with Internet 1000.
To get something similar from Cox, with much slower upload speed, I’d have to pay $119.99 + $50 for unlimited data, so that’s a total of $169.99 for an inferior service, why on Earth would anyone pay $80 more for less. The Cox rep had an impossible job to retain me as a customer, there was nothing he could say to convince me to stay with Cox, there was nothing he could offer me to beat the AT&T offering.