In the end, Cox did admit issues outside the home and in the neighborhood, and we found it helpful that I could share some solid evidence of a very real problem with them, using the results of the Automatic Speed Test: Why use The Automatic Speed Test?
These were just some of the things I needed to do to help figure out what the culprit really was. In my home, we wound up replacing outdoor cabling, trying different cable modems, and even bypassing our router by running on a laptop directly attached to the cable modem.
Automatic Speed Test, for longest time it’ll let you Results can also be saved, if you take a moment to set up an account. Very simple, and effective, with easy-to-share results. You make a choice of city for the server you're going to test against, set your frequency and duration and click 'Start Automatic Test' and it's off and running. But for repeated, automated tests, the one I found that does what I needed is called TestMy Net, aka, Internet Speed Test v13, aka . No flash or Java, just HTML5, explained here. A quick Google search found a lot of speed testers, like the that Cox and Comcast and others have directed me toward many times. What I needed was a way to easily leave a system running for a while, to hit the network every few minutes and test the speed, without me having to click anything. They only poll periodically, and the signals strengths looked good, and the pings responded. Cox support's own logs merely showed all was healthy with the network as well. So now what? The problem struck only 2-4 times per day, and the rest of the day, the network was healthy, and speeds tested out fine. Occasionally, I'd log into our Motorola cable modem after such an outage to check in on the logs, noticing it was sometimes rebooting. These sort of intermittent issues are the hardest to nail down, and can be expensive and aggravating to resolve.Īll members of the household would simultaneously notice a 3-5 minute extreme slowdown of our service, falling to around 1Mbps downstream, with a random assortment of much slower than normal upstream as well. For weeks, I've been trying to help my ISP, Cox, get to the bottom of a sporadic slowdown of my home broadband service.