Northern California → Is Paxio real? Do they really offer service in San Jose?

I currently have FTTP with AT&T (San Jose 95126 greenfield apartment completed in 2010), and I'm in a battle to get my pathetic 18/1.5 (notice the 1.5 part) upgraded to 24/3, which is supposedly never offered to FTTP customers, being exclusively reserved for the copper FTTN xDSL customers instead.

I finally found about the existence of this company called Paxio exactly yesterday, which is advertised to offer residential and affordable FTTP in multiple cities in the Bay Area, specifically including San Jose as one of the localities.

So, my question is, are they for real? What is their coverage area and how come they have so few customers hanging out here at dslreports? Are all of their customers just happy with blazing fast speeds and awesome prices, and spend their time actually using the internet at the full potential instead of hanging out here in attempts to secure something less pathetic than 1.5Mbps upload speeds? The company seems to have been offering competitive residential FTTP for years now (according to the few reports that surface around), yet somehow most people in their serving area are only familiar with Sonic.net being the ISP of choice amongst progressive customers.

Please kindly refer to my earlier post in the Paxio forum, which appears to be like totally empty, with my post from earlier today enjoying a timestamp of being 12 months apart from any prior message or reply.

»Coverage area in San Jose? Or Santa Clara County in general?

Yes they are 'for real' and you'd know if they served your location. I had the luxury of having Paxio a couple years back and it was amazing.

Where can I find new apartment complexes in Santa Clara County that have Paxio on board?
How would I already know if they served my location?
Do they offer Static IP subnets with their residential service?

1. I wouldn't have a clue.
2. If they served your premise you'd only have Paxio as a single provider, that was the way it was in Brentwood.
3. I had the Burstable Internet business package that included a couple Static IP's.

Are you saying that neither the local telco nor the cable company wires the buildings and apartments that are served by Paxio? Heh, I wonder why that might be? (-:

I'm curious whether Paxio is "allowed" to install their fibre on premises that already have AT&T FTTP pre-wired (or should I say, pre-glassed?). If I was an AT&T investor, I'd be kinda pissed that AT&T is engaged in such wasteful acts merely due to their monopolistic position and implicit collusion with the cableco.

In order for providers like Paxio to be profitable their business model requires exclusive contracts with the owners of apartment complexes or the developers of condo/townhouse projects. In the former case your rental agreement and in the latter case your hoa agreement prohibit you from using anybody else for Internet service.
The costs to bring fiber into a single home would be far too high to recover them even with decade long term agreements. It is amazing how something that looks as ridiculously simple as crossing a barely noticeable dry ditch can drive up the cost of the project when it turns out that it is classified as a creek on the county map and therefore requires an environmental impact report and the approval of several government agencies (real example, and the prospective provider walked away from the deal to serve a business park because of the cost).
The exclusive contract provides a quick return on the investment since in this day and age most residents would sign up for their Internet service (given that it is the exclusive provider or no Internet at all).
It is not just Paxio who does this, there are other providers who use this business model. If I'm not mistaken, AT&T and Comcast are competing in this space too.
As for a apartment/condo/townhouse complex that already had other providers serving individual units, apparently that is no guarantee that the property owner or the hoa will not enter into an exclusive provider agreement later on. That scenario is probably far less likely then an exclusive service agreement at the time of new construction but I have read about such cases.

Just to be clear: while I understand the reasons for doing this kind of anti-competitive business, I wouldn't like it if I were restricted in my choice of service provider to just one option. The obvious concern would be inflated prices in the absence of competition but often the exclusivity agreements come with a discount that is passed on to the user. More serious is the issue with service quality since the provider has little incentive to fix congestion issues when he knows that you can't switch to a competitor.

Edit: Please see the clarification from Paxio below that they are not using exclusive agreements.

So some residence communities have legal rights to deny "disapproved" telcos from entering the area? That doesn't sound very right, although to be fair, I'll gladly ditch my AT&T FTTP for Paxio, as Paxio is both much cheaper in all the options offered (even for the subnet of 32 static ip addresses, at 20 dollars it's 10 dollars cheaper than AT&T), as well considerably more competitive as to the speed provided.

The point that you bring, about lack of competition should you have PAXIO, in my view is an excellent argument for municipally-owned fibre, where the end-user service is offered by third-party providers. E.g. a system similar to UTOPIA in Utah.

I'm not aware, and have never heard of, of telco and cableco employing similar provisions against each other: there may only be one telco and cableco at each community, but usually they do form a duopoly as opposed to a monopoly.

Hi leibold --

I understand your criticism, and I have heard of providers who work as you describe, but Paxio is NOT one of them. We do NOT lock any HOA or apartment complex into using our service. We don't feel a need to compete by limiting people's choice -- we're confident they will not want to leave after trying our service.

In fact, we have no "contract" that locks you in for a period of time. You can try Paxio for one month and decide its not for you and owe us nothing. But guess what? Nobody does!

As far as the cost of bringing fiber service, we are a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) and can use overhead poles and underground conduit to bring fiber to a property. It isn't cheap, but it is certainly within the budget of bringing a HOA complex or apartment building online.

-- Joe Barnhart

Hi guhuna --

I'm surprised you got the impression that you couldn't have any other choice in Brentwood. Actually Brentwood is served by Paxio, AT&T and Comcast for internet service.

But I'm very glad you liked your Paxio service and hope we can add you back someday. (Although to be honest we have no footprint in Antioch at this time...)

-- Joe Barnhart

Now that it's mentioned that Paxio does in fact compete with AT&T and Comcast in the area, I'm curious as to how the following turns out!

Naturally, I have two interesting questions:

1. How easy is it for Paxio to get customers. Obviously, both the speed specs and the price are just awesome and I have little difficulty to believe that once you have the service, you won't be looking back. But there's still this initial step. How does it go?

2. What do the telco competitors do. For example, in my situation, although we don't have Paxio (yet), the building is pre-glassed by AT&T with fibre. Yet what does AT&T do? They service their fibre with speeds below what they offer on copper. I presume some other communities here in the Bay Area may be in the same situation. Or is it the case that Paxio, so far, was mostly going after greenfield communities, so AT&T explicitly wasn't bothering with installing FTTP as it might have otherwise, knowing that they won't have much business anyways? Or do they still install their FTTP, only to have a few customers that could be confused that AT&T's 18 does actually stand for only 18/1.5, which is 13 times slower than 20/20, yet is entirely in the same price range? What does AT&T do? Is there at least one known community that has both AT&T FTTP and Paxio?

I think the above two questions are pretty interesting to entertain.

Cheers,
Constantine.

Hi ConstantineM --

Every project is a little different. There are challenges but anything can be overcome. I normally just "lurk" here as I don't want to turn this forum into Paxio marketing. You have provided contact information, so we'll follow up with you personally and we'll see what we can do together.

-- Joe Barnhart

Hey, nothing wrong with a little marketing here! I believe others would benefit, too, from getting some of these questions answered or otherwise entertained, and also from some maps of the buildings covered provided, too. ^_^

However, I understand that my two enumerated questions above are probably somewhat sensitive information that you may not want to reveal in entirety. As such, I welcome educated guesstimates from non-NDA'ed customers in this public forum. (-:

Actually, I also had this problem when I was moving to San Jose in March. I tried to find an apartment with Paxio service, but didn't have any success (it doesn't seem like many complexes even tell you who is offering service in the area, although, pretty much everywhere in SJ seems to be the same.)

Since my lease is up soon, I wish I could move to a place with Paxio :-/