

You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate - yanw
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/you-dont-want-isps-to-innovate/

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slpsys
"Even now in San Francisco, one of the springs of innovation on the net, a
standalone DSL line from AT&T costs $35 a month for a top speed of 1.5 Mbps
down and 384 up, with reliability that’s simply embarrassing."

This is my single biggest gripe about living in the Bay Area.

~~~
dhess
If you'll allow me to pimp my ISP for a moment, depending on where you live in
the Bay Area, there's reason to celebrate, not gripe. I don't know of a finer
DSL provider in the U.S. than Sonic.net, a local ISP based in the North Bay,
providing service to San Francisco and a growing number of cities on the
Peninsula, as well.

I've been a customer since 2005 and have only had one incident of downtime, an
admittedly frustrating week of up-and-down service that turned out to be a
failing modem, which they replaced free of charge. The few times I've had to
contact them for technical support, I've been connected to a knowledgeable
support person in Santa Rosa in just a few minutes or less. They even provide
phone support on Saturdays until 9pm.

Their CEO regularly interacts with customers on Twitter
(<http://twitter.com/dane>). During the period when my modem was failing, I
complained to @sonicnet and @dane on Twitter, and received email from Dane
himself within the hour. He even called me the next day (I believe it was a
Saturday) and told me that he'd been personally monitoring my line, and had
made some tweaks to my DSL configuration to test some theories about what was
wrong. (For the record, it was also he who first guessed that my modem was
failing, which turned out to be the correct diagnosis.) And it's not like I'm
a major Twitter personality, either: I only have 70-some followers.

Anyway, I could go on about their excellent customer service, but you get the
point.

Sonic.net recently started offering what they call their "Fusion 2" product in
San Francisco, which is a bonded (two-line) ADSL2+ service that doubles your
up- and downstreams. I'm a bit far from the CO, so I "only" get 17/1.25 on my
bonded line, but apparently some customers get upwards of 30mbps down. I could
always use more, but it's enough to make me less envious of the Comcast
DOCSIS3 service, anyway. I'm paying $70/mo for my Fusion 2 service (up from
about $60/mo that I was previously paying for my 6/768k service), which is
well worth it for me. They've even reduced my pricing in the past, unprompted
by me: one day I just received an email from them that said, "Hey, starting
next month you'll be paying less for your service."

They're about to change their pricing to a 2-tier model: $50/mo for "up to
20mbps" (as fast as you can go on one pair, basically) and unlimited US voice
(POTS, not VOIP); and $100/mo for "up to 40mbps" on two pairs with two voice
lines. They're grandfathering in all of their current bonded customers at
their current rates if they don't want the voice lines. They're also rolling
out support for Annex M, which doubles your upstream for a small hit on your
downstream. Sonic.net is the kind of ISP that lets you get technical if you
know what you're doing, so they're going to let customers toggle Annex M
support on and off from the "member tools" webpage at the customer's whim.

So, tl;dr version: Sonic.net is a fantastic DSL-based ISP. I still get jealous
of DOCSIS3 speeds, but supporting an excellent local company with an engaged,
technical CEO and peerless customer service is worth the tradeoff, in my
estimation. And in any case, they're apparently considering offering up to 4
copper pairs in the future, and are currently building a fiber network in
Sebastopol to test the waters in the fiber market, as well. If they end up
bringing FTTC to SF, my life will be complete....

Oh, and for the record, I sent this Wired article to Dane and he seemed to
agree with it, which is nice to hear from the CEO of a growing ISP. (This was
his response: <http://twitter.com/dane/status/16991940057>)

~~~
slpsys
hah. i don't know how i just noticed this now, but i've already been a
sonic.net customer for 6 months. it still sucks they're one of the only decent
companies in an area so flush with tech.

