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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

There is - Sonic. Sonic is a dumb pipe company. No middle boxes, just bits. Sonic fiber is deployed in Santa Rosa and is slowly moving into San Francisco, but their management doesn't want to go into heavy debt, so it's slow. You can also get Sonic in many areas of California, but it's over leased AT&T lines.

The CEO of Sonic says that being a fiber provider is profitable without any additional services, and that their wholesale cost for upstream bandwidth keeps dropping.

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I have Sonic FTTN 50Mbps service. I've used Sonic over the years and have always enjoyed their service and their mission as a business. I've lapsed a few times because their DSL in some places in SF is just crap, but that's because of AT&T and distance to the closest CO.

Where I'm at now (prob less than a mile from their fiber service, sigh..), when we first moved in, we got Comcast. Of course, the Comcast service was all over the place. Some days 1Mb, some 100Mb (which I never signed up for, but just received), some 45Mb (what I signed up for). As usual, I had man techs come out to try to fix things and of course, none did and all of them had a different excuse as to why things didn't work. So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.

Fed up, I saw I could get Sonic FTTN and it's been rock solid for over a year. It's never gone down and just works - as I would expect. It's too bad we don't have more ISPs like them because if we did, access would be a totally different experience.

As a (very anecdotal) counterpoint, I subscribed to Sonic for a year in an apartment in Mountain View near Latham and Rengstorff with absolutely abysmal results. It's been two years, so the exact details are hazy, but I believe the plan advertised a 20 Mbps down rate. What I received was a connection that tended towards 100 Kbps down and peaked at about 125 Kbps. There were frequent outages - around once a week - for minutes at a time, not to mention a three-week wait for installation (having already paid the sign up fees). Sonic was totally unhelpful in resolving any of these issues and made it extremely difficult to cancel my contract without incurring large fees (despite their deceptive advertising) to the point that I waited until moving out. I will never use them again for anything and actually prefer Comcast.

I don't think Sonic has ever advertised a guaranteed bandwidth for their DSL offering. It's always "up to", which greatly depends on a lot of things with DSL. It's too bad you had such a terrible experience with customer service, I've been with them for almost 10 years and all my experiences have been good.

But in your situation, it sounds like you were likely extremely far from the central office, and probably had lousy indoor wiring as well. 20Mbit/s is basically the "I can see the phone company office from my window" speeds (less than 1000 wire-feet, give or take).

My ADSL2+ here in Brisbane Australia runs at 20.1Mb/s -- which is because I live in the literal middle of the "tech area" of this city. Quite spoiled, but as new apartment buildings go up around me, the connection speed starts to struggle as more and more people come online...

Jealous, my line speed is set to 19.999.

A lot of it has to do with the AT&T copper that they are actually connecting over too. I had their paired DSL offering in Redwood City. One of the lines got something like 10Mb/s, but the other was an abysmal 2Mb/s. It just wasn't worth it to keep the second pair. Sonic was a great company to have as an ISP, but in most areas, they are only as good as the copper they get from AT&T.

Yep this is half my point, line quality is huge in DSL. Sonic (or any other DSL provider) couldn't reasonably give you a guarantee on speeds, even though they know how far you are from the CO (last time I checked they gave you this number when checking availability). I have paired lines and they are also unbalanced (approx 6.5 and 5.5 down), despite assuredly taking the same path from the CO.

I had a similar experience in San Francisco, where they refused to send AT&T out to actually fix the 100 year old copper they were trying to push DSL through. I ended up canceling after never getting more than 1 Mbps.

I had similar issues a few blocks away. Luckily I was able to cancel easily within the first 30 days.

You mean KBps as in kilobytes per second right?

> So many support people promised me good service but I never got it.

That was my experience with comcast as well. So many friendly people who promised so much and they all delivered nothing. It was maddening. Months after I cancelled, I got a check that returned all my money. I would have preferred internet service given that they were the only provider around, but that was not something their support people could provide.

Looks like you managed to dodge the Comcast annual 50% price hike "just because". Burn in hell Comcast. Burn in hell.

*until Comcast is allowed to acquire Level3. When you can't buy backbone traffic from anyone but competitors, you'll see just how hard monopolies can punish smaller competitors.

I expect Cogent will be the next company to be acquired by one of the last-mile providers after Level3.

Sonic is awesome. They have excellent customer support and actually care about and actively protect your privacy.

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/sonic-isp-privacy/

Sonic is the best utility of any kind I have dealt with. It's like getting internet out of some guy's garage back in 1991, in a good way. The one time I had a technical problem, I called tech support and someone picked up the phone and actually fixed my problem. Amazing! I mean, that shouldn't be amazing, but it was.

i imagine upstream bandwidth is the cheapest part of the equation. inside our datacenters, 10 gig links are pennies per megabit.

It sure is. For Tier 1 providers its actually free. Settlement-free is largely what defines peering. It's an exclusive club. Even crazier is that you will never see a peering agreement contract, its all done on a hand shake. The whole "paid peering" concept is a somewhat recent phenomenon and not applied to members of the exclusive club.

Bandwidth isn't really free, even to the so called Tier 1 carriers. Transport, crossconnects and ports cost money regardless of if you have settlement free peering or not. More often than not the other costs are far larger than the actual bandwidth.

Even if the so called Tier 1 carriers are losing their prominence due to donut peering of smaller operators and large content providers building their own networks, getting settlement free peering with the big ones remains a challenge. Settlement free peering itself isn't an exclusive club, but being an operator with significant market power is.

While the majority of settlement free peering agreements are informal, studies show that about 10% are more formal with written contracts and conditions.

My comment was in response to price charged by one party to another to move bits, bandwidth as in opex. Of course nothing is free and gear is capex, albeit with heavy discounts and handsome depreciations on capital leases.

Even with public peering fabric which is what I think you are talking about and that I've used LINKS, NYIIX and AMS-IX etc,. you still have to backhaul that traffic yourself, its not making a significant dent in Tier dominance.

What studies have shown that there are contractual agreements for settlement free peering? Citation? Links? I would be interested in seeing that. My source was from experience working in the industry.

I'm not saying the cost is significant in the grand scheme of things, but unless you own the whole physical network, the co-lo facility and the IX then your transport, crossconnects and port costs are OPEX, not CAPEX.

Transport, crossconnects and port costs apply regardless if you use a public IX or do private interconnects.

Here's a link to the study about settlement free peering: https://www.pch.net/resources/Papers/peering-survey/PCH-Peer...

I had the percentage wrong, or then I may recall a more recent study. This one is from 2011. Of course it depends greatly upon who you peer with, as to whether a written contract is needed or not. As such the sampling may skew the results.

We (PCH) committed to performing that study every five years, and we're beginning the process again now, for a 2016 edition. Expect results in six to eight months. Based on what I've seen of the industry in the past five years, I'm guessing there won't be any huge change since the last one.

           -Bill

In my apartment, I could only get ADSL1. How is that even still a thing?

ADSL2+ would be close to Comcast's affordable cable internet plans, and thus interesting competition.

AT&T wouldn't offer anything better than ADSL1 either, so I guess nobody's investing in the copper plain old telephone system.

It's limited by the distance and quality of the copper connecting you to their system.

The only thing that can improve this limit is pulling a new wire. The other providers can't do anything different because their ADSL would be piggybacking of the exact same physical wire.

If someone's going to pull new wire, then there's no reason to not make it an optic wire and skip the copper, since you can provide all services (including landline phone) over that.

So yes, of course, in that sense nobody's investing in the copper plain old telephone system, and never ever will be.

what do they say about selling out? it all sounds too good to last. if they're profitable, some big company is going to try acquire them.

They give money to the EFF and FSF and have vocally supported net neutrality many times.

In Los Angeles, as a customer, I got a mailing from them FOR supporting title 2 and encouraging an open internet. Wild...

They might not be able be bought, they are feisty like Theo and for some people (myself included) throwing money in our face won't make us take action that will screw over society.

Preserving freedom is more important than the fanciest of homes and most luxurious car...

Well then, I'm a long way from CA, but I'm still rooting for them.

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