Sonic.net CEO Blog

I live in one of those unserved rural areas. Both AT&T and Comcast refuse to run a wire another mile down the road, and since they are the duopoly, tough luck. Fortunately we have a local wireless ISP and I get 12Mbps via a 2.4GHz radio link. It's nowhere near as good as wired, but I'm grateful. Another local ISP is working on laying fiber with federal grants but it will take many years. The best analysis I've ever read on why US broadband sucks comes from the CEO of Sonic, a Bay Area independent ISP which is awesome. tl;dr: Michael Powell sold Americans out on false promises of 5 different media for broadband. Turns out only 2 really work. https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/09/02/americas-intentional-broadband-d…

The classic reference for this is: https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/08/11/the-five-levels-of-isp-evil/ What you're describing could be any or all of levels 4, 3, or 2.

Sonic.net customer here. Why I give them my money: 1) https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/ The company is politically outspoken and well aligned with the interests of its customers. 2) Their customer service is actually knowledgeable, empowered and downright pleasant to engage with. The only frustration I've had is whenever they've had to delegate work to AT&T.

In the SF Bay Area, there is sonic.net. Their privacy policy: https://wiki.sonic.net/wiki/Category:Policies#Privacy Also, a blog post on the recent law: https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2017/03/29/privacy-matters/

Dane Jasper, ceo at Sonic in the bay area has a good track record around privacy...so far...https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/category/privacy/

I know Sonic is publicly against limits and throttling [1]. Their DSL connections don't have any sort of caps. Now, with Fiber the scale may be different, but I don't see their position changing. Their CEO also said that bandwidth wasn't their biggest cost. (but I can't find the link...) [1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/02/web-hogs/

Switch to Sonic.net if you use AT&T in the bay area: http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/23/drilling-through-the-caps/

That isn't the worst by a long shot. I'm all for net neutrality, but Title II classification for ISPs really worries me. I was co-founder of a VOIP startup in 2003, and a significant percentage of our time and resources was spent dealing with how the service was going to be classified for purposes of the Telecom Act. A bunch of the states were wanting to regulate VOIP providers as telephone companies, the FCC was on the fence (the pulver / fwd decision wasn't out yet[1]). Almost everyone was advocating for VOIP to be classified as a interstate information service so that we could avoid the onerous outdated state-by-state telephone company regulations. We got what we wanted (VOIP classified as a information service), but then a few years later we ran into the problem of ISPs blocking/interfering/throttling VOIP connections. The FCC in its first net neutrality foray went after some of the companies (See e.g. Madison River[2]) for blocking VOIP. However, the interesting thing was they could only go after Madison River under their Title II authority because Madison River happened to be a DSL provider and subject to Title II authority. When they went after Comcast for Bitorrent blocking of course they lost[3]. If we had been subject to Title II and regulation as a telecommunications service almost all of the states had regulations they would have applied to us included such gems as: * tariff filing * price caps or approvals * required interconnection with legacy…

ATT is now rolling out U-Verse in San Francisco: http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2013/May/Att.htm The challenge to ATT's plans was manifold: 1) ATT refused to put their equipment underground. SF's sidewalks don't need more cabinets. 2) U-Verse is DSL service. Sonic.net already offers 40mbps DSL service in SF, so U-Verse is not that much faster. Why does SF need more cabinets to get pretty much the same data service from the incumbent telco? 3) ATT is putting cabinets on the sidewalks, and running fiber to those cabinets to serve ~45mbps connections to folks ~800 feet away. If ATT had planned to run fiber from those new cabinets into residences ~800 feet away and provide 100mbps or 1gbps service, folks would have welcomed their project. 4) Monkeybrains [0] and Sonic.net [1][2] have had (for several years) workable plans to eventually deliver 1gbps service to the whole city with (they say) far fewer aboveground boxes that ATT "requires" for U-Verse, and don't even need to dig up the street to lay the fiber. I'm not sure why they've been ignored by the Mayor's Office and the DPW. [0] https://www.monkeybrains.net/DPW-MonkeyBrains-March-2011.pdf [1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2010/07/14/micro-trenching-at-sonic-net/ [2] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/15/sonic-net-plans-gigabit-fiber-net…