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Review by oddhack See Profile

  • Location: Alameda, Alameda, CA, USA
  • Cost: $90 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
  • No Cap
Sonic is pro-privacy
Price is uncompetitive, tech support is terribly understaffed, will never install fiber at my address
Sonic may be heading for extinction. They don't offer compelling value for non-fiber customers
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

Updated 2017/04/11 In February, Sonic rolled out a systemwide $10/mo. price increase, which was coupled with another $10/mo. increase after the first year's promotional price went away. The result is that I'm now paying around $91/mo. for 40 Mbps DSL. This is in no way competitive - AT&T's restructured offerings would give me 100 Mbps for $60/mo. (first year), $70/mo. (second year). Sonic's supposed motivation for this price increase is to give them funds to build out their fiber network. However, they have also been very clear that they will never build fiber in areas where AT&T or other companies already have fiber installed - which means that for the vast majority of Sonic's customer base, they've imposed a 25% price increase to build a service that those customers will never receive. Unsurprisingly, this has generated a great deal of unhappiness on Sonic's own customer forums, with a thread now up to about 500 posts and a number of customers who have left. I may become one of them soon. I strongly dislike AT&T, but getting 2.5x the performance for 2/3 the cost is pretty compelling - and the money saved will pay for a high-quality VPN service. I appreciate Sonic's attitude towards privacy but they are no longer in any way cost-effective for customers who aren't on their fiber network, their support staff is so terribly overburdened that extremely long wait times are normal, and their CEO is pushing a strategy that makes no sense at all for most of their customers. I won't say the writing is on the wall for Sonic, but I don't understand how what they're doing can possibly work for them in the middle-term, much less long-term.

Updated 2016/06/22 After moving to Alameda, I was very fortunate to be located close enough to the CO that Sonic's own VDSL2 x2 service was available. Most of the island is limited to much lower ADSL2+ bandwidth, or Fusion FTTN through AT&T. My initial download speed was around 35 Mbps, which was well below the minimal estimated performance at my reported distance from the CO. Sonic was reluctant to call out an AT&T tech to look at the lines, but after some prodding on their own customer forums, they did send someone out. He found my loop went a block in the wrong direction before heading back to the CO and changed it out, boosting performance to the 40-41Mbps range. That's still disappointing, but it is within the low end of the speed band for this disance. The rental VDSL2 modem is enormous and I'm considering buying my own replacement.

I have had considerable interest in helping Sonic get fiber deployed on Alameda, and have been in touch with a bunch of neighbors on Nextdoor as well as the city mayor and her IT manager. However, Sonic has been completely unresponsive to my questions on what specific actions might facilitate their wanting to deploy here. All they'll ever say is a boilerplate "tell your neighbors to become Sonic copper-line customers because our deployment plans depend on uptake in an existing area." Unfortunately, Sonic's DSL performance over most of Alameda is so dismal compared to cable providers that this is an impossible sell - poor performance today for the slight chance of better performance, at some unknown time in the future. Whereas municipal fiber on this small, affluent, and (at one point) already wired for fiber island seems like a no-brainer.

TL;DR this shows the basic problem Sonic is having. They don't have the resources to roll fiber in very many places, and at the same time, their competitive position continues to decay on the legacy copper products they provide. I don't see how they get out of this trap. I like Sonic's service, but prices are no longer competitive; performance definitely isn't, even on VDSL2; and customer service is terribly overloaded and no longer gives quick turnaround on almost anything. I stay with them because I hate AT&T and Comcast so much, basically, but eventually the performance gap will be so huge I'll feel compelled to switch.

Updated 2015/07/27 After moving to Los Altos recently, the existing Fusion service was a dismal 2.8 Mbps. Sonic's website only offered Fusion X2, which would not have been a meaningful improvement. They have a weird policy in place where if you lie between ca. 4400' to 7000' from the CO, they will only qualify X2 as an upgrade.

After telling a rep on the Sonic customer forums that they were about to lose a customer, he authorized a Fusion FTTN (e.g. resold AT&T U-Verse) install at my new address. It took two weeks to get the AT&T tech out, but when he came he was quick and efficient, and the new service is delivering about 8x the performance of the old. The VOIP ATA has some issues - every call begins with a few minutes of clicking that eventually goes away - but basically works as well.

I am less than pleased by the required rental of the AT&T-locked modem/router - there is no option whatsoever as an FTTN customer - and required rental of the ATA. I already have a perfectly functional Obi 202 ATA which cost $0 when used with Google Voice. But OTOH, the voice taxes are much, much smaller than regular Fusion service, so I'm only paying a few bucks more for FTTN than I was for Fusion.

I'm also annoyed by the 12 month contract requirement - which is again due to AT&T AIUI.

I'm most annoyed that AT&T openly spies on its customers' U-Verse traffic. Sonic is working on some OpenVPN options that will help here, but they're not ready for prime time yet.

At this particular address, I'm quite close to the RT (I think about 400'), and line performance shows it's capped at 60 Mbps - I could probably get close to that speed by upgrading to Fusion FTTN x2 for an additional $20/month, but 23 Mbps is such a big improvement over regular old Fusion that I'm OK for now.

Overall, in terms of performance and stability Fusion FTTN is fine for me. The price is acceptable. The dependence on AT&T and its intrusive monitoring is extremely annoying, but it's the only game in town at this point - Sonic is in a very bad spot and locked into the abusive AT&T relationship until and if Sonic can deploy fiber widely. Sonic's VDSL2 option would be great, but only works for the relatively few customers who are really close to the CO.

Updates 2014/10/27 Sonic hasn't changed my service technically. Fusion continues working just fine. They've even allowed an opt-out of the annoying modem rental policy for new customers.

The camel in the tent, though, is that Sonic hasn't changed my service technically. Dane has been talking about fiber for years and they have nothing to show for it aside from a pilot project. Attempts to deploy fiber appear to be stalled everywhere, either because of NIMBY/permitting issues or because it's just too large a project. Meanwhile I'm stuck on a line that gets 8 Mbps down at the best of times. Recently Dane has been talking up VDSL2, but that won't benefit customers who are as far away from the CO as I am.

Bottom line: as much as I like Sonic, and as much as I hate AT&T/Comcast - if Sonic can't figure out how to provide even vaguely competitive speeds, I don't think I'll be a customer much longer. I can no longer recommend Sonic to most people since they performance is so terrible (I convinced my SO to switch from Comcast - now she's getting 1/10th the performance and can't tolerate it for much longer, either).

Updated 2012/07/06 Since my last update, DSL and voice service have generally been great (once in a great while it can fail to ring through for voice calls, for no obvious reason). Unfortunately, Sonic has just instituted a new policy requiring customers to rent modems - at $6.50/mo + $9 shipping fee - and more importantly, is hiding the fee from new customers. You can find out your true cost - in exactly the same fashion as Comcast, by clicking and clicking through multiple pages of fine print and adding up all the fees and charges and so on. Sonic's CEO has posted an announcement that they're doing this because it's "industry standard practice". What he doesn't seem to consider important is that Sonic's customers often are customers because they do not want to be subject to industry standards as established by the major telcos and cable providers. Announcing they're enthusiastically headed down that path means that I can no longer recommend Sonic.net to anyone, even though my own service has been fine (and probably will be, for a while yet... of course that was true at Speakeasy too, until they sold out).

Updated 2011/02/15 I think Sonic has just resolved the one significant bobble with my Fusion install: my phone number was swapped with another customer! There was a certain amount of finger-pointing between AT&T and Sonic over this (and an AT&T tech showing up at my door for no clear reason related to the problem). Didn't affect the DSL part at all but it was getting kinda frustrating, so glad to have this working.

So far I'm getting ~6.5-7 down / .7-.9 up using my old modem in ADSL1 mode. Hopefully the new modem on order will do better, I'm only about 6000 feet from the CO. But even this is twice the performance I was getting with DSL Pro and ends up costing about the same as the old DSL + AT&T landline.

Updated 2011/02/10 Just switched to Fusion voice + ADSL2+ service after several years on regular Pro DSL. As usual the Sonic.net guys on the phone were very friendly and helpful, even though I know they're understaffed and very busy thanks to the demand for Fusion.

Switchover scheduled for 6 days from ordering at 11 AM, line went down around 11:05 for about 5 minutes and came back up running at ~6/0.7 Mbps on the same old ADSL1 modem (and ADSL1 filters), about double the old performance. I have dial tone but haven't made any calls yet

Ordered a D-Link DSL-2640B ADSL2+ modem from Newegg to replace the Zoom ADSL1 modem I have now. It is cheaper than the equivalent Sonic.net offering and, more importantly, is from a company I've actually heard of before.

Original ADSL1 Service Review

I'd been looking for alternatives to Speakeasy for several months and pretty well settled on Sonic.net due to their sharing the same virtues Speakeasy had when I started with them in 2001 (small, local, responsive, Linux-friendly). Finally the Best Buy acquisition of Speakeasy pushed me over the edge.

Ordered on Monday morning, had the install scheduled for Friday. DSL modem arrived on Wednesday. Woke up on Friday, restarted the old Speedstream 5620 modem, reconfigured the NAT box for DHCP, and I was up and running.

I'd ordered Pro service (3.0/512) and was seeing about 1.5/400 initially. Talked to Sonic support on Friday afternoon; they looked at the line stats and had AT&T turn it up. Now getting about 2.6/430. Seems a bit low when I'm only 6600 feet from the CO, but it's early in the process and perhaps some things can be tweaked still. The Sonic-supplied Zoom 5615 seems to perform just marginally better than the old Speedstream, though the difference is down in the 1-2% range. In any event it's a big boost from the Speakeasy 1.5/384 service level, and I'm paying $40/month less (OK, that's the introductory teaser rate, but even without that it's a net win).

Thus far I'm very happy. All my interactions with Sonic, whether presales qual, sales, or support, have been smooth, efficient, and pleasant. And my nightmares of Geek Squad employees picking up the phone when I call for tech support have gone away.

OT: why does the review form list "Pacbell" for TELCO and CLEC? It's all AT&T now, not even SBC anymore much less Pacific Bell. Not that I like them any better no matter what they change their name to - they're still the Phone Company.

Update to add: Sonic support contacted me in response to the review and explained the amount of framing overhead expected. With that taken into account, the 2560/435 numbers I'm seeing seem right on the money for a line capped at 3000/512, so changing the "connection reliability" rating accordingly.

member for 19.3 years, 78 visits, last login: 2.3 years ago
updated 6.9 years ago


eqbal00
@sbcglobal.net

eqbal00

Anon

thx

Great, detailed, review. Thanks for the updates.

Tobester
join:2000-11-14
San Francisco, CA

Tobester

Member

the future of Sonic?

In your synopsis you state, "technology base is increasingly dated and no relief on the horizon."

From reading the Sonic forum, several reviews and postings have mentioned being upgraded to Sonic's FTTN Fusion service, including higher speed.
oddhack
join:2004-11-28
Mountain View, CA

oddhack

Member

Re: the future of Sonic?

FTTN is a possibility that didn't exist when I last updated the review. I'm considering it. But I'm very concerned about Sonic's lack of control. AFAICT, they are a pure reseller of AT&T's U-Verse, with no actual operational / management role in the network. That means customers are completely subject to AT&T's policies - worst of all, potentially to their (openly admitted) spying on their customers' Internet activity. Also, Dane's response on the internal Sonic Access forums regarding details of FTTN are considerably less customer-friendly than I'm accustomed to hearing from them. It's all rather worrisome, but there may be no realistic alternative to FTTN + Sonic's VPN to avoid AT&T's spying.

Also, while it may be temporary bobbles in the initial rollout of FTTN, they have some very weird upgrade policies in place. In particular, their availability tool does not offer either VDSL2 or FTTN to existing Fusion customers in a certain distance range (4500-7500', or thereabouts) from the CO, a range which happens to include me. All they're willing to offer is Fusion X2, $20/month more for a marginal performance increase (in my case, it would go from 3.5 -> 7 Mbps for around $70/month). Meanwhile, DSL Extreme, using exactly the same U-Verse infrastructure for their TRUEstream product as Sonic does for FTTN, offers 24 Mbps for barely more than half that price - or 45 Mbps for less than Sonic would charge for 7.

Whether FTTN makes sense (or is available at all) depends on a wide range of factors, some of which I don't fully understand yet. They are obviously trying to do better, but are heavily constrained by the physical and commercial realities involved. Sonic FTTH is what I'd really want, but there's essentially zero prospect of that ever happening in my part of Silicon Valley, since Google has already announced an intention to deploy there - which I expect will serve to kill the interest of small ISPs like Sonic that are struggling just to deploy fiber in very small areas of a handful of cities.

Tobester
join:2000-11-14
San Francisco, CA

Tobester

Member

Re: the future of Sonic?

Thanks for the updated information as I have not read such anywhere in the Sonic forum. Great work and kudos for taking the time to let others know. Sincerely, Tobester
oddhack
join:2004-11-28
Mountain View, CA

oddhack

Member

Re: the future of Sonic?

I recommend following the sonic.net internal "Access" forums if you really want to keep track of this stuff. Lots of good posts there and it's where I've learned the stuff I mention above.