Introducing Cox Gigablast

@nrs

Yea, unfortunately that's what I have noticed about wifi in general, it's rather difficult to know what you can actually expect. Perhaps, if one of your friend has a laptop with 802.11ac, that you can borrow and try? I know some of the newer mobile device (iPad and newer iPhone, Android) has the 802.11ac capability as well. Although once again, I don't know how they would compare between a laptop vs mobile device. 

I recommend you put Ethernet if its possible, that's the only way to really get everything out of the giga speed. Ether way, enjoy your faster speed 

As Wifi gets faster and faster, it gets more and more complicated internally. They try hard to make it work in the same way to not confuse consumers, but as you get above 100-200Mbps, a lot of it comes down to compatibility of the wireless adapter and your router. Not only hardware compatibility, but tweaking becomes more complicated since faster wifi standards have more features which can be turned on/off for performance. Add to that firmware issues on the router and driver issues with the adapter that can slow things down.

IMO if you can physically run ethernet, do it. Make as many devices as possible wired. Not only will this make those devices faster, but it will free up wireless space for the devices left.

I have this randomly occurring issue (so far twice), that I want to see if I can maybe get a better response here. I called Cox for the same issue, but they insisted that there is no problem.

On the ONT, there are three lights, if you are facing the ONT, the one at the left most is the "activity light" that one that appears to blink rather periodically when working properly. So here is the situation, normally the activity light will blink periodically (at least that's what it appears to the eyes), I get a ping about 1-4 ms MAX, and upload speed is good. However, I have observed, twice now, there are times when the "activity light" will blink periodically like "blink blink blink blink" then will completely go away for roughly a second, then resume "blink blink blink...", and repeat. when this is happening, my ping will shot up to about 30-80 ms, although the upload/download speed seems to be about the same.

I have called Cox on this the first time, although I was told there is no problem that they can observe, and it's all normal. I can tell you that is not, because I'm looking at a ping that is 20-30 times longer. I can also tell you that there is no problem with my system, because the solution, is to wait it out, usually the next day everything goes back to normal, the activity light as well as the ping. Also the second time this happened was right after, we had a lost of internet (my surveillance camera sends a notification every 15 minutes when it lost connection to the internet). According to the notification there was a period of an hour which we do not have internet connection, and right after the internet is resume, the activity light and ping issue appears. Personally, I'm OKAY with this, because the service is not interrupted, however for Cox to tell me it's all nominal seems to be a bit weird.

I can't say that I'm terribly bothered by this, getting too old to get all worked up about little tech issues. But just figured that I'd share and see if anybody else is experiencing the same problem.

@ChrisL

Thanks for the reply, in that case I have two more questions for you:

First, When I first got the ONT, I was told by the tech (on-site) and over the phone, that when it comes to fiber, you will "always" want to connect via a router. Something about the fiber overwhelms the computer. They told me that while we were doing a troubleshoot of the router provided by Cox, and I asked "why don't I just connect the computer directly to the ONT to see if it's the router's problem", to that they responded "Oh no, with fiber you will get lower result when you connect directly to a computer, we don't recommend testing like that". So I have gotten two different story on this, can you clarify this up for me?

Secondly, the problem is so random and it usually doesn't REALLy affect the connection, but like I have mentioned you can tell the activity light is not behaving as it should, and the ping is going way up. But it usually won't last more than the night or a few hours, so the time the tech comes out the next day (or couple days after) I will most likely not be experiencing the problem anymore. Is there no other way on your end to check on this?

To answer your question, yes it still does behavior the same way if I connect the computer directly into the ONT,  you can simply tell by the abnormal behavior of the activity light. It would be nice if Cox can trouble shoot simply based on why the ping is so high, I called in once about it already aren't you guys curious? 

@ChrisL

I get the whole idea of troubleshoot, and I have no problem with that. I'm just a bit confused about the inconsistency of information that is given to me by Cox tech that's all. When one tech says it's bad and it's other one says it's okay to connect computer directly to the ONT, after a while it's a bit difficult to take Cox seriously. Also you just provided me with the third reason not to connect to the ONT (that it's fragile) so you don't want people to test by connecting directly to the ONT. 

Anyways, thanks for replying, I'll default back to the good old Google for answers. I'm just a bit surprised that Cox has no further way to test the connection.

I live in Ahwatukee at the Ray/Chandler loop and got it installed today.