The Core Dump

The Core Dump is the personal blog of Nic Lindh, a Swedish-American pixel-pusher living in Phoenix, Arizona.

[By Nic Lindh on Tuesday, 08 January 2008]

Corporate communications at its finest

Cox Communications isn’t great at, well, communicating.

At Casa Core Dump we’ve been using Cox Communications for our Internet service for years and years. In general, it’s been good. Very few outages and great downstream speed. The pathetic upstream is a constant source of tsuris, but even if we wanted to change, we couldn’t. Nope. We live less than a mile from a huge Intel fab in the largest city in Arizona, and we can’t get DSL. Sigh. It’s either cable or some kind of satellite connection—FIOS in Arizona is just a gleam in some Verizon executive’s eye at this point.

We’ve also been using Cox for cable TV, and they gave us a pretty good bundling deal for phone service, so all our communications at the house now comes from our good friends at Cox.

Who recently sent us a letter saying they’re going to increase our bill by $10/month starting on the 15th of February.

Fine, OK, it’s still worth it, so not much to say about that. Except for the other content of the letter, which says that the deal we’ve been getting so far is so great that we should be tickled pink our bill is only going up by $10.

OK, fine. We’ll bend over. But wait, there’s more! We’re also getting faster Internet service. Yay! Faster Internet good. And we’re going to get more HD TV channels. Which is a good thing, as the current Cox HD lineup is pathetic at best.

What the letter doesn’t address is when we’re going to get the faster Internet service or when we will get all these fabulous HD channels. Or exactly which channels they’re talking about.

Now, I’m just a cave man and your modern world scares and confuses me, but how about giving us some dates for the upgrades we’re going to receive? How soon is “soon?”

If you don’t want to commit to hard dates, at least a rough indication of which quarter we’re talking about would be nice. You’d think that would be possible.

Oh, and sorry Cox, but the minute FIOS comes to our area, you’re toast.

You have thoughts? Send me an email!