By default, Cox will DHCP to your systems some DNS servers which behave like OpenDNS, i.e., if there is a DNS name miss, the servers will show a hit which is a Cox search page. This can confuse a lot of things. Cox has provided a way around this:
for residential at least, it uses these two IPs as static DNS:
68.105.28.13 68.105.29.13
and these do appear to be noticeably faster!