
IAmA Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, Northern California's Largest Independent ISP - quantisan
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/im_dane_jasper_cofounder_and_ceo_of_sonic/
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Permit
I especially enjoyed the story of Sonic's founding
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/comment/dxu0km...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/comment/dxu0km6)

Relevant portion pasted below:

Regarding the founding, when Scott and I were at the Santa Rosa Junior
College, he did a project in 1992 to provide dialup access to students, using
this new OS called Linux. Linux had just gotten its first Ethernet interface
driver support a week earlier (for the Western Digital 8003EP, a 10BASE2
thinnet card), it was very early, and under really active development - great
for a student project. Active SRJC students could get dialup shell access for
the semester and use Telnet, email, FTP, IRC, Gopher, etc.

Some months later we got a call from another college reporting that “one of
your students is being rude on the Internet”, and would we please tell them to
stop cussing at people on IRC. (Yes, the Internet was a kinder, gentler place
back then.)

We looked up the student record and discovered a weakness in our signup
scheme: the staff who ran the campus mainframe didn’t trust students like us
with much access to records (think: WarGames style grade changes), so we
allowed students to sign up with only a birthdate and SSN, and we asked the
mainframe if that was a current student via a serial line, which squirted back
a 0 or 1 (no or yes) to indicate enrollment status.

As things turned out, some student employees in registration had figured this
out, and when an older student (Mildred) would sign up for aquatic aerobics at
the local JC, the SSN and DOB was being put on a Post-It and sold to a student
(Max) at the nearby high school. Max, as it turned out, liked to troll folks
in IRC, leading to the discovery.

Asking around, we learned that the going rate for a stolen college login was
$25, which led to a lightbulb moment: If people were stealing this thing, we
could replicate what we’d built at the college and offer it commercially. Thus
began Sonoma InterConnect (SON-IC, get it?).

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wpietri
I'm a huge Sonic fan, so this is great to see. I stuck with them on DSL for a
long time just because a) I wanted a reliable, well-supported connection more
than a flaky but nominally higher speed line, and b) I hate oligopolies, and
did not want to give Comcast a nickel.

Now, though, I have their gigabit fiber and it's great. Less money, same great
support, and much higher speeds. I feel very lucky to live in one of the few
competitive ISP markets in the country. Free markets are great when there's
real competition.

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ww520
They seem to just trying to milk as much out of their DSL customers as
possible, designed to push them to fiber. I used to have their DSL. Their DSL
price was then raised to $55+ a month after the $40 introductory rate. The
speed was not great at 3Mb/s, due to AT&T line quality. I've asked for a break
due to the low speed but the response was the $40 was for new customers. It's
a horrible deal even for $40. I finally bit the bullet and switched to Comcast
on 100Mb/s for $50.

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wpietri
If I understand rightly, the economics of DSL are not great, because they have
to pay AT&T a lot for the access. I agree that 3 Mb/s is not great; I was at
12, which seemed fine to me.

I still thought that was a much better deal that Comcast. I occasionally had
to deal with other people's Comcast lines, and the poor quality and terrible
support meant that I was happy to pay a lot more for a reliable connection
with smart, effective people at the other end of the phone when I needed them.

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bobbytherobot
I find it crazy how AT&T keeps trying to sell me the same DSL for more money
with data caps than I pay Sonic.

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handedness
I found the WISP discussion interesting:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/im_dane_jasper...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/im_dane_jasper_cofounder_and_ceo_of_sonic/dxuay14/)

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saryant
I remember getting a call from Dane when we first got DSL from Sonic.net
living in Benicia. He wanted to ask if the service was up and running to our
satisfaction.

Great company, miss having them as my ISP.

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sulam
I will be happy when I can buy their Gigabit product. Until then, Comcast has
my business. :/

(Previously I was a very happy customer, but having children pushed me from
being a "9Gbps is fine" customer to "ok, I need some serious bandwidth now"
kind of guy.)

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robbiet480
...I sure hope you meant 9Mbps, otherwise I and I assume many others here
would be very jealous of a home 9Gbps connection and more jealous that you
didn't think it was enough for some pretty light internetting :)

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sulam
Sigh, yes. 9Mbps.

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lewis500
Bless you

