My new, high-speed blogging hub of operations.Kevin Drum
I guess this is my week for being hoist on my own cynical petard. As promised, I went out and bought a new cable modem yesterday. I didn’t do this because I thought it would make any difference, but because I figured I’d never get any serious help from Cox tech support until I did. So I bought the one that was on sale, plugged it in, allowed Cox to sniff around, and then ran a speed test to get a rough idea of where I was.
And . . . it was running consistently at 4-6x the performance of my old box. And in the last 24 hours, at least, it hasn’t crashed once. So the problem really was my cable modem, just like the Cox guy suggested.
Which is a bit of a mystery. I mean, it’s not like my old cable modem was some kind of relic from 1997. I bought it three years ago, and it’s still a current model—selling for more than the replacement box I bought. So why would it provide such sluggish service? And why would it slowly deteriorate over time to the point where it was crashing three or four times a day?
Beats me. Luckily I have wealth privilege, which means that if I can fix a problem for mere small dollar amounts, it just doesn’t matter. If the new device works and all it cost was $150, I don’t care what the problem was. In with the new, and off to the trash with the old.
