Review by wierdo  Posted: 1.8 years ago member for 7.8 years, 905 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Tulsa,Tulsa,OK
$54 per month
about 5 days
"Fast speeds, low latency"
"None yet"
"Happy as a clam"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection Reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
|
Thanks to my apartment complex having had a deal with AT&T Home Entertainment, I had not had a cable modem available to me until very recently. I'm always a sucker for speed, so as soon as Cox became available (and AT&T went away), I placed an order. The offer of free installation for orders placed before they turned up the service sealed the deal.
Ordering was easy, I just had to fill out a form and fax it in. I got a call the next day (Friday) confirming my order, and saying that they would do the installation on Monday. Unfortunately, they didn't make it to my apartment until Wednesday, by which time I was getting rather irritated. It's not as if they were caught unaware that they had a little over 300 apartments to service. Monday, they had 10 technicians on site, but by Tuesday, they decided to only send out five. This despite their deciding to replace every single splitter in the complex, in addition to whatever other installation work was necessary as far as cable modems, cable boxes, and phone service was concerned.
In any event, the installer showed up around noon on Wednesday to install a cable modem, a DVR, and another regular cable box. The whole process took about 45 minutes, and went very smoothly, although I did have to specifically request he use a 3 way splitter so I could keep my TiVo plugged in. Still easy as pie, though.
On to the actual service, which is really the only thing I truly care about! In short, it's blazing fast. Given the horror stories I've read over the years about Cox in Tulsa being slow, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I could hit 12Mbit/s with a simple HTTP connection to my dedicated server halfway across the country. I did some further testing, downloading a couple of Linux distributions and found myself the proud owner of a DVD in less than an hour. One and a half megabytes a second isn't anything to sneeze at!
I would have been happy, even if it only hit 8 or 9 Mbit/s, since the maximum I could get out of AT&T's DSL with my line was a sync rate of 3Mbit/s, which after overhead left me with only about 2.5.
Despite my excellent service in Springdale (9 Megabits out of 9 Megabits, at least after a problem with the drop was resolved), I placed my order with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised. The only question that remains is whether the service will remain as high quality over the long term.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Cox HSI |
|