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.
Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California
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Re: Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California
#22I 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.
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 car…
Unfortunately, part of Google's problem is that they are at the mercy of the stock market. It's a "Scorpion and the Frog" problem.
Re: Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California
#23I 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.
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.
Re: Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California
#24I 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…
$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)