as awful as cox's service is, packet loss / ping spikes cant be exclusively blamed on them (outages though)
i think this website should be stickied at the top of the forum with the others https://www.badmodems.com/ start at the 'whats the issue?' page the amount of modems / gateways out there with the intel puma 5/6/7 is unreal. i actually upgraded from one intel puma to another. i didnt start seeing real stable, consistent internet until i migrated to a broadcom chipset based modem. if youre really too lazy to read the link. millions and millions of modems out in the wild feature a chipset by intel named the puma that is absolute dog water for any type of jitter or latency sensitive application. the chance that youre on one right now is pretty high.