Here's why: At around 5-6 pm every day, the internet slows to a crawl. Now, while somebody might say that it could get slow when everybody is home watching TV or surfing the net (or both), that it would be slow. I would love for that to be the case, except that even at midnight, it's slow. How slow you ask? Well, let me tell you this. I use a download tool called FlashGet and it helps me see how fast a file is downloading. Most of the time, if it's a small file, it'll stay there for at most 10 seconds. I'm currently downloading a 19 MB file and it's telling me that it's going to take 9 minutes to complete. The speed is 14.0K. But that's not the worst of it. One night I was downloading a 66 MB file and it said that it was going to take 6 hours to finish at a speed of 0.42K. 6 hours?! I've already called the help desk and they have said one of 2 things: (1) it's their service provider's fault (which is Cox) or (2) since my modem is not one of their modems, that they can't help me. They've also tried to get me to test my internet speed on their speed tester, and according to it, I'm getting the speeds I'm paying for. There is a flaw with using their speed tester: Their building is .5 miles away from my apartment and it is still in town.

I keep wondering to myself: And I'm paying $80/month for this? That cost is cable TV and the internet, because I have to have cable to get cable internet. I could go DSL, but for the same speed (6 Mbps), I'd be paying over $100/month. *screams*

--DK