[geeks] Cox digital NOTworking service

[Shannon Hendrix]

A little complaint in the dark woods where no one can hear it...

On April 7 2008 Cox started their EON upgrade in my city, which  
converts them from copper to fiber optic.  We were supposed to lose  
service for an hour or so.

7 hours later, no service, so I called.

"There is a network outage in your area we are working on."

To keep this short, I called every, twice, and was told each time they  
had no ETA, no idea what was wrong, but that it was a network outage  
in the city that they were busy working on.

Thursday I was unable to connect to Cox's phone lines due to excessive  
call volume.

Friday I called and they told me that there had been no outage, and  
that the problem was that my service had been disconnected by  
accident.  They said crews were so busy they could not come out until  
Sunday.

Sunday a crew that I like to call "Dumb and Dumber" came out and and  
said all of the working was fine to my building and the street.  They  
said the problem was that the power levels on the street were too low  
and another crew would have to fix that.

Monday I call and bitch, and awhile later a crew comes out.  When they  
leave it still doesn't work.

I call and bitch again and I'm told they are still working on the area.

Finally one guy comes out and looks at all the street distribution  
boxes, and rewires them.

He says, "Whoever wired the street last week must have been in a  
hurry.  They wired the street backwards."

For 8 days my service was down because some idiot wired the street  
backwards, and at least 6 crews who came out to fix it never noticed  
the problem.

NOTE: I have a modem ISP account and my router does auto-fallback, so  
I didn't lost networking completely, just the speed... :)

On the bright side: the service is faster now, but I still think FIOS  
is the way to go, especially since my ISP might be a reseller.  Not  
sure if Verizon is going to let them do that like they do DSL or not.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com