Cox proxies — AS22773 residential cable exits

Cox covers where the other two don't

Cox Communications (AS22773) is the US third-largest cable ISP by subscribers — approximately 6M residential broadband across 18 states — but its geographic distribution is distinctive. Where Comcast covers the Northeast / Chicago / Mid-Atlantic and Spectrum covers the South / Carolinas / NYC / West California, Cox fills specific pockets that neither of the big two have touched:

• Phoenix, Arizona — Cox's single largest market nationally. Effectively the default residential cable ISP for Maricopa County.
• San Diego, California — Cox serves San Diego metro (not Spectrum or Comcast).
• Norfolk / Virginia Beach, Virginia — Hampton Roads residential market is Cox-dominant.
• Northern Virginia suburbs (Fairfax, parts of Loudoun) — shared with Verizon Fios.
• Rhode Island — Cox is effectively the state's only cable ISP.
• Omaha, Nebraska — Cox is the dominant residential cable ISP.
• Oklahoma City, Tulsa — Cox territory.

In these markets, Cox isn't "a" cable ISP — it's "the" cable ISP. That matters because a Cox residential exit in Phoenix or San Diego is the statistically-expected residential consumer signal for those metros; a "Phoenix residential" claim without Cox ASN is either a different tier-2 provider or a laundered prefix.

The AS22773 footprint

Cox is privately held (a Cox Enterprises subsidiary) and doesn't publish the same level of investor-facing network detail as the public- company cable operators, but peering data on bgp.tools and peeringdb puts AS22773 at ~120 announced IPv4 prefixes, with the bulk concentrated in the key Cox metros above. The carrier peers at Equinix Ashburn, Equinix Phoenix, Equinix LA, and Equinix San Diego as first-class participants, which means traffic routing from a Cox residential exit to a major cloud-hosted target takes the short Tier-1 peering path.

When Cox is the right pick

• Phoenix metro work where Cox is the statistically-default carrier
• San Diego metro residential (Cox has no competition in most of San Diego County)
• Hampton Roads / Norfolk traffic targeting military-adjacent or coastal Virginia demographics
• Northern Virginia creative QA when you want a Cox-specific signal distinct from Comcast or Verizon Fios
• Rhode Island or Omaha / OKC / Tulsa residential — these are Cox- exclusive territories

Fingerprinting notes

Cox is a less-common carrier ASN in national integrity-stack training data than Comcast or Spectrum (simply because of relative subscriber count), but it reads as "legitimate residential cable ISP" across all major GeoIP and trust-graph vendors we've observed. In Cox-home metros (Phoenix, San Diego, Norfolk), Cox is actively weighted as the statistically-expected residential signal and typically scores at or above Comcast / Spectrum national baseline trust.

Cox Business is a separate sub-allocation and reads as "Cox Business" on detailed lookups. Our Cox residential pool excludes business prefixes.

Related: Cox Mobile

Cox also operates Cox Mobile, an MVNO on Verizon's network. Mobile IPs announce through Verizon AS22394 with Cox Mobile sub-allocation tags. Not included in the Cox AS22773 residential pool.

Pricing and pool access

Cox AS22773 ASN pinning is available on Carrier and above. Recommended starting state pools: Arizona, Virginia, California (San Diego metro specifically).

References

• peeringdb.com — AS22773 Cox Communications
• bgp.tools AS22773 — prefix inventory and peering data
• Leichtman Research Group: 2024 US cable ISP subscriber tracking