Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users
Cox warns customers to lower usage, imposes 10Mbps upload limit on “gigabit” plan. …
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Cox Communications is lowering Internet upload speeds in entire neighborhoods to stop what it considers “excessive usage,” in a decision that punishes both heavy Internet users and their neighbors.
Cox, a cable company with about 5.2 million broadband customers in the United States, has been sending notices to some heavy Internet users warning them to use less data and notifying them of neighborhood-wide speed decreases. In the case we will describe in this article, a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month.
Cox responded by lowering the upload speeds on the gigabit-download plan from 35Mbps to 10Mbps for the customer’s whole neighborhood. Cox confirmed to Ars that it has imposed neighborhood-wide slowdowns in multiple neighborhoods in cases like this one but didn’t say how many excessive users are enough to trigger a speed decrease.
Mike, a Cox customer from Gainesville, Florida, pays $150 a month, including $100 for 1Gbps download speeds and 35Mbps upload speeds, and another $50 for “unlimited data” so that he can go over Cox’s 1TB data cap. Mike told Ars via email that most of his 8TB+ monthly use consists of scheduled device backups and “data sharing via various (encrypted) information-sharing protocols,” such as peer-to-peer networks, between 1am and 8am. (We agreed to publish Mike’s first name only but reviewed his bills and confirmed the basic details of his account with Cox.)
Generally speaking, data usage for most households declines significantly during those 1am-8am overnight hours, so a robustly built
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