I have never joined a forum in my life, but am totally frustrated by Cox for the last year+.
I have a "new" cable box (which in Cox's world, I believe means it is under 5 yrs old), the Explorer8642 HDC. This is the 3rd box tried in a series of replacement boxes. 13 yr customer that didn't have many problems at all for like 9 or 10 years. Then suddenly our black Motorola box (10 yr old box/technology?) started to intermittently stop sending a signal to the TV. We'd be watching a show and it would go blank. Sometimes after sitting there, it would pop back up after a minute or two or three. Sometimes I would have to pull out plug and let it do it's boot-up thing. Got a replacement, same type box and after a short period of time, low and behold, same behavior. Was told they "know about some issues like that".
Weird thing about it is, that if we were recording something and watching at same time when it happens, it seems to record the show right through these dark periods. Leads me to believe that it's definitely not a problem of the signal not coming down the cable into my home, but rather it's just not sending signal to TV during this time.
To placate me Cox told me to get the "new" all home box and just use it for the one TV. They would graciously waive the $60 install fee (which wound up on my bill in $20 increments until I noticed). They brought the new box out, but it wasn't the petit little high tech box in the showroom, it was a huge clunker that was obviously somewhat old (but hey they weren't charging me for this tech upgrade, so I didn't complain). Seemed to work ok for about 2 months, but then here we go again. My last hour long tech phone call got a great guy who seemed to really invest himself into fixing my problem and he had me ultimately go in and set the power off to "manual" which made a massive improvement....for about 3 weeks. Again this was a "known issue" with this box. I thought it might be heat related, so I pulled everything away from the box, but to no avail.
Well, now here I am on a Friday night wanting to relax and unwind, but no real cable service. This makes me really begrudge the fact that my bundled Cox bill crept from $120 mo to about $200 since Nov 2011 (a 66% increase). I don't know where that additional $$ is going, but I do know it wasn't a capital expense for new, high tech cable boxes.
Is anyone else having these intermittent signal interuptions? Is there hope out there for me of a lasting solution?