

Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California - nkurz
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/SonicNet-Offering-1-Gbps-Unlimited-Phone-for-40-in-California-128995

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ulfw
Hello Linkbait title! 'in California' = one lonely 8000 souls village in the
outer North East Bay. Woot.

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rogerbinns
Note that Sonic does a bit of a con on the "free" phone service. They won't
let you forgo the phone service. That results in additional $12 in charges and
taxes on your bill, over half of which is a fee that goes entirely to Sonic.
In the US phone companies are allowed to charge extra fees to comply with the
law, and Sonic charges the maximum allowable. Not even AT&T does that! Of
course they are very skilled at making it look like the fee goes to the
government, but it doesn't.

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barsonme
I sincerely hope more companies will follow in Google's footsteps with cheap
prices for fast internet. As much as I love what Google does with its
innovations, the more competition the better.

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higherpurpose
I hope so, too, because I'd worry about what a Google in Comcast's position
would do. Google isn't the net neutrality champion it was a decade ago. They
are still in the group that promotes net neutrality right now, but I don't
think they're trying too hard. Even AOL [1] seems to outspend them on pro-net
neutrality lobbying (AOL!). Google must be quite worried about FCC
reclassifying Internet providers are common carriers, too, and they probably
don't want that either, otherwise they'd outright push for it.

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/16/5724952/companies-that-
hat...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/16/5724952/companies-that-hate-net-
neutrality-spend-more-than-supporters)

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rosser
That's why I'm thrilled it's Sonic doing this. They've been my (DSL) ISP for
almost 3 years now, and I couldn't be happier. (Well, it could be faster; I'm
9k-odd line-feet from the CO, so even with bonded Fusion, I'm only getting
10/2 — but I'd rather pay Sonic more for less bandwidth than subsidize the
stain upon the species that is Comcast.)

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danans
I had Sonic ADSL until recently, and their customer service was excellent, but
I'm just too far from the CO to get reasonable speeds, so I (sadly) switched
to Comcast. I hope that some point they will start offering FTTH in my
neighborhood (50 miles west of Brentwood), but who knows if local city
government will ever allow it.

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hornd
Yea, it's really tough -- I currently have Sonic in Alameda and do not want to
switch back to Comcast, but at the 4/1 speeds I'm currently getting it makes
it hard to work from home.

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chaosphere2112
Excellent. Now, even if they don't deliver to my neighborhood (which is kind
of a toss up, as I'm next to a school, but also in a cluster of much older
than average housing), my comcast speeds will improve. Thank goodness for some
competition, and some shockingly sensible city government.

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fallinghawks
In Brentwood. Which happens to be a very tiny town in California.

Sonic's a darn good ISP, though. I wish they offered service in my area, I'd
take them up in a heartbeat.

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NDizzle
Not even $40 1Gbps internet would get me to put up with the traffic required
to get to and from Brentwood. Highway 4 is the pits.

What a strange place to launch a service.

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Implicated
_Brentwood_ \- Here comes a surge in UCLA applications.

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subway
Wrong Brentwood.

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firloop
1 Gbps down sounds nice, but what's the upload speed going to be?

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imgur
Only in Brentwood, California ;)

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observer1101
I fail to see how this model works unless it's being subsidized by some other
source. Fiber is not cheap to purchase, deploy or to maintain as a medium, let
alone all of the equipment that lights it, routers that will route it, and
upstream network to offload the traffic. I see that the city will be leasing
them the conduit, which will make deployment significantly cheaper, but didn't
see any details on rates. If one person uses 500Mbps (half of their bandwidth)
for 37 hours out of the month, and sonic.net has negotiated basement bottom
prices for bandwidth alone at say $0.50/Mbps, that is still a $250 cost to
them as a provider. Sure there's over-subscription models, but even if a small
percentage of their users actually use the bandwidth, they would have to be
losing money on this approach unless they traffic shape or cap speeds slower
as a "shared" resource. Can someone please explain how the economics of a deal
like this could lead to profit for the provider?

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toast0
$0.50/Mbps probably isn't bargain basement: Hurricane Electric advertises
$0.45/Mbps ($200 minimum).

Also, business pricing is $40/seat... there's going to be a good amount of
profit there, I'd guess. It's also not easy to use even 500 Mbps, I would
guess even heavy users would rarely sustain that much traffic (although there
would certainly be some)

