Cox Internet are POS for gouging customers during quarantine....

Well, they did increase from 1TB to 1.25TB and suspended overages for several months...

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Yet, they make zero concessions.

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So, increasing your cap 25% doesn't count as a concession? Something they didn't have to do, by the way. I hate this mentality that people have assuming that since things changed for them businesses/entities are now obliged to give you shite for free. You act like Cox is doubling their prices because of the pandemic. They are simply following the contract y'all agreed to when you signed up for service. If working from home is causing additional cost to you, then that sounds like an issue between you and your employer on who should be covering that cost of business. As far as the school thing goes the extra 250GB would be more than enough to cover one kid streaming 8 hours a day, likely enough for 2. I don't know shite about what schools are doing with kids right now, but I would bet your Cox bill they are not streaming continuously for 8 hours every day. IIRC, when I was in school a school day was 7 hours which included lunch and an off hour, as well as classes that likely wouldn't be streamed like choir, art, PE, shop, etc. So, I think that extra 250GB would probably cover 3+ kids school streaming needs depending on the situation.

My Cox bill was cut 33% for 4-3 months during quarantine...

Just an FYI - It doesn't cost Cox anything to "add" data to your plan. Theres nothing technical about it.

They're doing it arbitrarily to fill in gaps in pricing structure and make profits.

Charging on data should be illegal. They do no own the data and the data is not a finite resource that goes away. Many people will say "if everyone uses data at the same time, the bandwidth capacity will be overtaxed and take down the network." well guess what, you already pay for that, you pay for speed of your internet, which addresses the bandwidth limitations. They are trying to also implement data caps and data overages too as if they own the data and as if you were to use to much data that would not leave enough data for someone else. THATS NOT THE WAY IT WORKS.

Additionally, people will also say "mobile companies charge data caps and no one complains about that" well guess what, they don't charge you for data speed, you get their fastest speed unless you go over your data limit, then you either are charge for the extra data or your speed is throttled.

TL;DR - screw any ISP that believes that should charge you a data cap if they already charge you for speed.

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So, increasing your cap 25% doesn't count as a concession? Something they didn't have to do, by the way. I hate this mentality that people have assuming that since things changed for them businesses/entities are now obliged to give you shite for free. You act like Cox is doubling their prices because of the pandemic. They are simply following the contract y'all agreed to when you signed up for service.

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While I agree it's tough to get pissed over a contract that you agreed to, I think it's time that we as consumers start pushing back against the anti-consumer practice of data caps.

First recognize that it costs literally nothing to transfer a byte of data. The ISP pays for a given capacity, not by the byte. It costs the same whether 1 byte is sent or a petabyte, the obvious difference being they have to pay for a bigger pipe if they move more data.

With that in mind, know that they oversell their capacity by about 40X. In other words, if the ISP pays for a 10 gigabit connection, they will sell about 400 gigabits of service to customers who all use that same connection. This is expected and required to optimize resource usage, so this fact in itself is nothing to get upset about. However, the justification for data caps and overage charges is to curb usage among "data hogs", but a more logical, effective, and ethical solution would be to oversell capacity at a lower rate so that you can provide the service that you advertise, and maybe simply throttle the "hogs" at times of high utilization.

But if the ISP and customer agree to these anti-consumer terms, there is another frick-you that really gets me. I'm talking about the next-byte and next-second problems that result from the monthly billing cycle cutoffs. If you use exactly 1TB in exactly 1 month, you're good. But if you use 1TB + 1 byte, that last byte costs you $10! Ten fricking dollars to send a single character. Similarly, if you are close to the cap just before your billing cycle resets, the same byte might cost you nothing or $10 depending on whether it is sent a second earlier or not. Ten fricking dollars for a 1 byte 1 second "error". Surely you can call and have the charge dropped for these borderline cases, but it's priced just right at $10 to make it a tough call on whether to spend half an hour talking to shitty customer service or just eat it.

Then there is the problem that if you are just over the cap, there is little doubt that at least some of those bytes were used by your own ISP sending you advertisements. Whether it's a text ad on google, a banner on TD, or a commercial on YouTube, over the course of a month you will no doubt use some of your precious bytes consuming ads from your own fricking ISP. And if you went over your cap, you paid them $10 for the privilege of watching their ad.


That's a lot of frickery to squeeze $10 out of you for something that costs literally zero cents. And it's all done to prevent you from streaming video so the ISP's own cable TV service looks more attractive.

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While I agree it's tough to get pissed over a contract that you agreed to,

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pretty sure there was no data cap for years until comcast decided to arbitrarily add it and certainly not when i first signed up.

i got fricked twice because they tested the first cap (250GB) in nashville so i've been paying overages for years.

so yeah, i guess the fact i kept comcast was silent assent they could decide at any time to bend me over a desk and arse rape me repeatedly but like southpark pointed out over a decade ago..

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I was just saying I wouldn't call keeping your price the same and increasing your data cap 25% "gouging customers during quarantine".

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I hear ya, but maybe OP considers standard practice of overage charges to be gouging, so technically they are gouging customers during quarantine (but also all the time).

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so technically they are gouging customers during quarantine (but also all the time)

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its literally the blockbuster overdue movie fee model.

the exact same thing.

its even mostly due to video (the data hog).

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While I agree it's tough to get pissed over a contract that you agreed to,

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This is a moot point.
I have no say in the contract. I can redline it and send it back to them and they'll tell me to go pound sand. I have no choice but to accept whatever they put in their contract, as every ISP is going to have the same crap in every contract. My choice is either don't have internet from anyone, or accept whatever terms they say. little one sided dont you think.