[olug] Cox Business Pricing

[Dan Linder]

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 21:02, Dave Rowe <dave at roweware.com> wrote:
> Has anyone had luck getting Cox to budge on their Cox Business
> pricing?  Seen here:
> http://ww2.cox.com/business/omaha/data/pricing.cox it runs $275/month
> for their top tier, which is comparable to the Premier tier on the
> residential side ($60/month), with the only notable difference being
> having a static IP and the port restrictions removed?  Is there
> something I'm missing?  I thought it would be nice to get that in my
> home office, but certainly cannot stomach that pricing.

I had their lowest tier for about 2 years so I could run a mail and
web server at home.  Yes, dollar-for-dollar the stated speeds were
more expensive for the Business plans, but the service was noticeably
better.

For instance, about 2 months before I upgraded to the Business plan,
there was an outage in my area that affected a number of myself and my
neighbors (Internet, TV, and phone were all out).  We called, and they
had a truck out later that afternoon.  The phone and TV came up, but
the Internet stayed down until the next afternoon - something about
waiting for someone in Atlanta to reset something is what I remember.

About two months before I canceled my Business line (the lowest plan:
4.0 Mbps down x 512 Kbps up) I was getting ping loss between my
firewall and their router (about 5-10%).  I called the Business
support line (different # than the Home cable-modem line) and got
right through.  I had already booted the cable-modem and hooked a
different machine up to it with the same results.  He didn't ask me to
"boot into Windows" or "run ipconfig /renew", and he actually
understood "Linux".  After a couple minutes of checking some things on
his end he said he'd send someone out.  About 45 minutes later, a Cox
truck was at my door.  The guy came in, he put a cable tester on and
determined that there was quite a bit of line loss.   Not only did he
fix that, but he also spent some extra time cleaning up my rats nest
of Coax and re-terminated all of the cables (I had recently run some
additional coax for new TV outlets).

About 18 months ago I tightened the financial belt a bit and we went
back to the basic home Internet service.  Right away I noticed some
subtle thing.  Sure, the initial speeds were a bit better, but the
consistency throughout the day (i.e. when families are home vs at
work) was better with the Business service.  I think their "Power
Boost" is just the inverse of "We throttle you down after 20 seconds".
 With the Business class, I always had a consistent speed when
downloading from well-connected or local sites (Amazon, Google, Cisco,
etc), but with the Home service I feel that the speed is more time
dependent (i.e. kids/families at home).  I've also noticed a bit more
delay/lag when I'm doing remote console connections over the VPN to
systems at work now that I'm back on the home service.

I'm really tempted to go back to the Business line - I don't think the
$275/month tier is really the same as the Home connection when it
comes to overall performance.  If you do switch, start out at the low
end and confirm that you truly *need* the 20Mbps speed - and that
assumes that the remote ends you're connecting to also have a >20Mbps
path that you'll be the only one using.

Dan
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