Cox has HORRIBLE network back end issues...

I had them at home in Orange County and at a business location.

The backbone packet loss was intense on the business circuit. We went back to AT&T (SBC) with a T1 for the price as their "HIGH SPEED" line.

For the few times that connectivity on Cox is slow (e.g. slow DNS) use the following OpenDNS servers for DNS:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

See http://www.opendns.com

This will generally only help if ping or tracert is sitting their forever on resolving IP addresses.

Generally I would use a browser based proxy to "check" and see if it's a United site down or Cox... There are free ones like proxyofliberty.com
Now getting Cox to admit they have a pairing partner outage is like pulling teeth....