I’m trying to debug a long-standing (2.5 year!) problem with our Cox Communications service. The symptoms are:

• The video service has blocking, and even an occasional audio pause. This happens frequently, around 1-5 times in a 2 hour period.
• The phone service cuts out for short times, perhaps 1-2 seconds. This happens rarely.
• The internet service drops packets, or only one-way flow of packets seem to to happen. This is hard to detect and diagnose.

Since the video side has the most problems, each of which was recorded on my TiVo, it became the best option to debug.

However, this means I cannot use my TiVo, as Cox suspects it is at fault. Thus, I am downgraded to live TV. Let me tell you, this sucks. I keep on reaching for the remote, hoping it will skip these commercials. Unfortunately, I’m once again in a very comfortable cage, and stuck watching them – not the last of which is that with 12 minutes of commercials in a one hour show, it’s very likely the video blocking will occur during one of these ads.