they do not artificially favor any speed test. however, the speed test they encourage (the one on the website) is to their own servers, which is one of the most direct node pathings. it is a bit disingenuous on their part.
Go to speedtest or ookla or dslreports and set the server manually to literally anything that isn't a Cox hosted server, and you will see the real world slowdown by distance and node hops.
"The problem is that these speeds are not holding up under sustained real-world loads, particularly on the Upstream side. I operate a Plex Media Server in my home and routinely stream from it throughout the day. In the past I was able to reliably stream at 8 Mbps, but in the last couple of months I have had severe buffering issues and had to bump down to 4 Mbps or less to get a stable stream. I have backed this up with a series of iperf3 tests, all of which show an initial transfer speed of 10 Mbps, which almost immediately drops to 4-4.5 Mbps after about a second of testing. Regular large transfers to other cloud storage services tell a similar story."
This sounds like your networking hardware is overheating, or more likely, a line in the ground got shifted somewhere and it cut one of the up lines. If you are running a media server then overheating is very likely, however.
Thanks for the suggestions. I have solid hardware in the chain, and I routinely monitored thermals and cpu usage on both my Media Server PC and my Router throughout my testing process, and neither were particularly taxed by the workloads or had any thermal issues to speak of..
As I mentioned in my follow up post a moment ago, I am considering this solved as I was able to achieve proper upload speeds to a local Cox hotspot, validating the performance of both my home network and the local Cox infrastructure.
