We’ll soon have another wireless provider to be annoyed with. Cox Communications—yes, the cable company—plans to enter the wireless game next year piggybacking on on Sprint’s network; it will launch its own 3G network, sans Sprint, before the end of 2009. (It’s also moving toward its own 4G, using LTE, network, but that’s a further out.)
Cox is moving into this arena in order to compete with the likes of AT&T and Verizon, two companies that have diversified their operations: AT&T with U-verse and Verzion with FiOS.
And now I ask, how does Cox rate? We’ve all heard the Comcast horror stories, and I’ve only used Cablevision and Time Warner, so I’ve not idea how Cox operates.
Yeah, try to keep a straight face when your grandma asks, “Oh, what new service provider do you have?” and you simply reply, “Cox.”
I’m a Cox broadband customer since May, and I’ve not had any problems. They’re only about on par with Comcast or Qwest in terms of horror stories, though. Over-priced, unreliable, poor support/service, I don’t think I would want a Cox cellphone, but I’ll wait and see how they do to make up my mind.
If Sprint can make the kind of customer service gains in a year that they’ve made, maybe anyone can run a cell-phone company.
I’m actually really happy that this has happened. The wireless industry needs competition. They are bloated and overly self-important. They want to dictate how I use my service, what devices I can and can’t use, what features I can use on the devices I allow. I hope Cox embraces more open data access and doesn’t try to ream people on one type of data vs another type of data like how on a data standpoint a txt msg is like 100x more expensive than just streaming those bits via the phone’s data service.
I really hope COX opens up the data game. The real problem is how many repeaters we have to have everywhere for cellphones. Their range doesn’t extend that far. So we have to have them everywhere. It’s expensive to have the army of guys from the Verizon commercial to service all of those things. Wimax and other tech have the promise of making more far reaching signals which will mean less cell towers would be needed and thus the price of a data connection would drop. It would be cheap and fast and have better connection areas than we currently do. In the process, cell phone companies will become weaker and cellphone companies and ultimately the users and their choices will become a much more dominant factor.
I have Cox broadband and digital HD TV service; no problems with the service and we’ve received a fair number of speed increases and additional HD channels over the years. I’m interested in their foray into mobile and hope they have more compelling handsets over those offered by Alltel (boring). If they were truly smart, they would start with their equivalent of the G1.
I had Cox back at my old apartment and had absolutely no problems with them whatsoever. Then I moved and got Comcast and had nothing but troubles and had to cancel it soon after. I would happily switch back if given the chance!