The unlikely success of California’s Sonic.net (2012)
arstechnica.comI've had Sonic service for about 15 years. I recently upgraded to 50Mb/s down, 6 Mb/s up. It's provided through AT&T, but there are no monthly caps and no middle boxes. They just forward the IP packets. Sonic is also in favor of net neutrality.
How's the fiber service in SF coming? Anyone on that?
So good it hurts, I never want to move again...
Sunset district - Gigabit fiber $72/month with mandatory phone service. I regularly get 580-700Mbps down and 550-750Mbps up. Symmetric! And it is always up. I am a very happy customer.
Very fast. Unfortunately I have only a wifi connection to my house's fiber, but still getting above 100 Mbps up and down. And less expensive and more reliable than comcast.
it's also moving to the east bay now!
Sonic is still alive, except that now (a) they have fiber coverage in San Francisco https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14424753 and (b) it's cheaper ($50/mo)
They also have Fiber for all office spaces in Santa Rosa within vicinity of the Sonoma County Airport. I've used Sonic since dialup/PPP in 1997.
The Airport fiber is kick ass and enterprise grade -- 1000 down/100 up for very reasonable prices (sub $1k if you are getting a CIDR block of any size).
Uptime has been great, even during the wildfires which burnt a number of sonic's staff out of their houses.
As a Sonic fiber customer in the Richmond, my only complaint is that phone service is not optional. It adds ~10 line items to my bill for regulatory fees at every level of the government from the city, county, state, and federal. I could happily do entirely without the phone service. I don't even have a home phone, who does?
Here's HN discussion of a 5 month old map of sonic fiber in SF. https://thatdan.github.io/sonic_fiber/
sonic, please build out the fiber to my neighborhood (san carlos)!