NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) — They’ve already upgraded their modems and are paying for the fastest internet service Cox offers, but somewhere along the line, their problems continue.
“For the month of March, we’ve been out [of internet service] five times, and it’s only the 10th of March,” said a frustrated April Jones, who lives on Druid Circle in the Villa Heights neighborhood.
She’s a contract administrator and has to have internet service for her job, and her daughter is in third grade.
“We spent all of Monday making up work that she missed because our internet is always out throughout the month,” Jones said.
And then, starting Monday afternoon, her service was out for more than 24 hours straight.
“I missed work, my daughter missed school. It’s very frustrating.”
Jones says when she lost service for half of October, Cox deducted more than half from her normal $300 bill.
“They keep giving me credit. I don’t need credit. I need internet service.”
So do her next-door neighbors, James and Lindsey Terra. Lindsey Terra was recently able to complete her engineering degree, but just barely.
“It definitely interfered with [my education]. I had to use [my husband’s)] hotspot a lot of the times, because we didn’t have reliable internet to be able to take exams and do my assignments,” Lindsey Terra said.
James Terra is a U.S. Navy electronics technician and knows how to test the speed of the service coming in.
“It’s not cheap paying for internet, especially paying for the highest package of internet that they have, and we’re not getting anywhere close to that,” Lindsey Terra said.
They say Cox has responded, but hasn’t been able to solve the problem.
“They had replaced some of the exterior stuff, saying ‘Oh, It might be that,'” James Terra said. “They gave me a brand-new modem, that didn’t do anything. Gave me a second one just in case the first one wasn’t right, and that didn’t do anything.”
A Cox spokeswoman responded with this statement:
“We are working to have this resolved as quickly as possible as we know how important a reliable connection is, especially during these times.
“While the COVID crisis has caused a rise in internet traffic, our network is performing very well. We have more than 29,000 neighborhood nodes nationwide and, consistent with a recent industry report, 98-99 percent of those are performing well with adequate capacity even with the tremendous level of increased peak usage due to work from home/learn from home activity.
“We’re actively working to improve the small number of areas where customers may be seeing some performance impact, through a number of techniques such as increasing network capacity remotely and upgrading facilities via construction.”