Independent California ISP Sonic.net has announced that they've teamed with former rival DSLExtreme to help bring the company's bonded ADSL2+ services to Los Angeles. According to a company press release, Fusion should now be available to businesses and residential customers throughout greater Los Angeles and Sacramento. Fusion offers users 20/2.5 Mbps speeds alongside home phone service for $40 a month, with some users able to get faster speeds with line bonding. "Our DSL Extreme partnership is actually the ninth ISP launch, so including our Sonic.net retail offering there are now ten ISPs on the open Fusion network platform," Sonic CEO Dane Jasper tells Broadband Reports.

Back when Ikano Communications acquired independent ISP DSLExtreme in 2006, a DSLExtreme employee told us that the first thing Ikano said to the company was "we don't want to mess with what you've done.'" Fast-forward to 2011 and we're hearing numerous rumblings in our forums that a large number of DSLExtreme tech support representatives in both California and Utah lost their jobs last week, with most of the company's tech support now outsourced to the Philippines. Users looking for support say the company's live chat functionality isn't working very well at the moment. We've contacted DSLExtreme for confirmation and will post updated information as we receive it.

Users in our DSLExtreme forum asked and apparently DSLExtreme listened -- the company has lowered the price of their DSL tiers to match an AT&T DSL price drop we reported on back in August. In fact, DSLExtreme took things a little lower than AT&T, and now offers their base 768/384 kbps introductory DSL tier at $13 if you sign a one year contract -- or $25 if you go month to month.