[olug] Cox sucks

[Daniel Linder]

On Mon, July 16, 2007 14:42, Luke -Jr wrote:
> Ok, so Cox is clearly blocking ports 25 and 80, despite that 3 of every 5
> representatives say nothing is blocked and there are no terms of
> service...
> So it looks like I have 2 choices:
> 1. pay for a MX and HTTP reverse-proxy
> 2. pay Cox for business-class service

I went through a similar quest a few months ago when my free rack-n-pipe
provider had to kick me out...  (Something about making way for a paying
customer or something.)

Anyway, I ended up going to the Cox at Work solution at home.  I did look at
some hosted servers (shared and virtual), but I was definitely keeping my
cablemodem service anyway so the cost of the hosted solution was nearly as
much as bumping up to the @Work solution, plus I got to keep 24x7 access
to my hardware.

My only complaints with Cox's solution are:
1: The bandwidth in an area is still shared.  I was under the impression
that the @Home and @Work services were on different frequencies/channels. 
Since we are all on one shared channel, I have to contend with their
traffic.  (note 1)

2: The cost difference between my @Home and the basic @Work was about
$35/month.  For that cost, I got ports 25 and 80 opened up, and lost some
download speed. :(

3: The @Work bill is separate from my other Cox services (phone and TV). 
There is no way to combine them -- this caused an issue when I first
signed up -- so their claim of "one simple bill" falls apart if you use
this combination of services.

Since I host my home/family web page and e-mail, I'm experimenting with
the new Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a).  A friend said that his
fathers small (5-6 people) CPA company in Texas likes it for their e-mail,
and the web-hosting service is passable.  I'm hoping they add a way to
upload direct HTML and image files rather than using their Web-enabled GUI
to create them.

If that all goes well I'll probably look at moving off the @Work and back
to the @Home service (less money, faster potential speed).

Dan

Note 1: I've been doing a simple BW monitor (pulling a 10MB download from
"speedtest.coxinet.net").  I'd like to find something that isn't on their
network but is still a valid test for a wider variety of Internet sites.

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