Show HN: Using city permits to map Sonic.net fiber | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Using city permits to map Sonic.net fiber

github.com

103 pointsThatDan48 comments

Link to the map itself: https://thatdan.github.io/sonic_fiber/

That's cool. Is there data for outside of San Francisco? For example, Brentwood? I am considering moving to Brentwood since Sonic offers fiber there. Would like to learn more about their coverage.

As someone who used to live in Brentwood, the Brentwood fiber rollout was very disappointing. Sonic used to have maps of their planned rollout that now point to dead links [0]. The house I used to live in was marked as planned to receive fiber by fall 2016, but when I put in the address Sonic says they currently don't service it.

For those who don't know, Brentwood was slated to be one of the first places in the Bay Area to get fiber, mostly because Brentwood required fiber conduit houses built for all developments after 2000, and because its city council was fairly generous to Sonic themselves. I don't strictly blame Sonic here... they took a risk doing this and likely were unable to drum up the support and enthusiasm in the community that would make a true city-wide rollout economically feasible. Seeing Sonic's experience in Brentwood makes me believe that the only way FTTH will be vastly deployed in the US anytime soon is through government subsidy.

[0]: https://www.sonic.com/get-involved-brentwood-fiber

San Francisco's population density, willingness to pay for faster internet, and displeasure with Comcast will hopefully mean more success than Brentwood.

Thanks!

Data is specific based on the city's permits. If Brentwood has a site similar to http://bsm.sfdpw.org/ for pulling permits that would be a start. You can always check your address at https://www.sonic.com/availability too.

Seems to be something weird going on in the bottom right - not sure if they really did put the fiber like that (seems unlikely), or visualisation error, or what

The data in the permits are just pairs of intersections. Sometimes there's some confusion on which part of the street is referenced in the permit vs the data from the city. Next time around I want to use the city's street shapefile to try and fix this.

There are other problems like the line that covers all of 23rd St which I don't believe is accurate and the line cutting across Golden Gate Park.

Thanks. I was like, noop, not gonna clone your repo, just show me the result.

It's interesting they seem to avoid the core city with all the high-rise condos and big companies focusing instead on mission hipsters and sunset grandmas.

i (think?) it might be related to the areas where services are still run by pole

I had Sonic Fiber in a high-rise in the SOMA/Rincon Hill neighborhood. Not sure why the permit data is not there but they definitely serve this area.

Interesting. Might be underground fiber. Permits are usually the same for blocking the street for manhole access and blocking the street for a bucket truck (Temporary Occupancy) but maybe neither of this was necessary and/or the fiber was pulled when the building was built.

I'm curious to see if the block your building is on has Sonic self-reporting has having gigabit service available. The FCC has a map at https://www.fcc.gov/maps/fixed-broadband-deployment-data/ but the data is 9 months old (ISPs are given 6 months to report data twice a year and the FCC publishes it about 3 months later)

Awesome. One of those blue lines is close by, so I looked up my address in Sonic's availability tool[1], and sure enough: "Gigabit Fiber is coming to your location Service is scheduled to be available Dec 2017"

[1] https://www.sonic.com/availability

Glad it worked!

I was spot-checking various addresses but Sonic's captcha makes it painful. Interestingly there seems to be no correlation to when a permit was pulled vs when service is actually available. There are addresses covered by permits from last year that aren't serviceable until 2018!

Budgeting? Staffing skills? Cautious entry? Revenue ROI projection validation?

Could be a range of factors....

Having the permit doesnt mean the fiber is pulled.

Fiber puller could be a third party installer and the negotiate contract cost/schedule/other legal-BS

---

I recall seeing some guys in 2012 up near 21st and Market, above castro - noe valley border, installing fiber. I stopped and asked them who tey were pulling the fiber for and the said "google" -- although google still doesnt have any residential fiber in that area that I know of... I could only think it was more for a "googler" as opposed to "google" or a "google user" -- or the guy was BSing...

Anyway, permit doent mean the lines are slpliced/polished/terminated and that they have equipment to light them up yet.

Heck - they may have access to conduit etc... but they may not have equipment space negotiations with some telco who has a CO in the area. and you know how much fun telco-to-telco contracting agreements are....

Very very true. I should clarify that the map is speculative at best.

I'm half a block away from one of the blue lines, unfortunately the tool's only presenting me with DSL... I love Sonic, but I used to have their DSL service and it wasn't great. Not Sonic's fault, but San Francisco's copper is pretty horrible.

These days I have a Comcast business account, but I'd take any chance to switch back to Sonic.

Sonic installed my fiber service late last year. Last week AT&T was hanging fiber on my street. I chatted with the lineman and he was upfront (unsolicited, even!) that the only reason he was out there was because Sonic forced AT&T's hand. Previously AT&T was building out FTTN infrastructure in places like Mission Bay, but he said they've completely ditched that strategy and are switching to FTTH. However, Sonic appears to be methodically rolling out fiber street-by-street. The lineman said AT&T had him installing fiber in a more-or-less haphazard manner. I guess AT&T is literally freaking out, trying to catch up and perhaps head-off Sonic as best they can.

Anyhow, point being, while Sonic's methodical rollout might mean they are unlikely to reach you anytime soon if they've already passed you by, keep an eye on the AT&T trucks. They may decide to systematically install service to the areas Sonic misses, or inexplicably serve your street before another. AT&T is charging $90/month to Sonic's $40/month, with less guaranteed throughput, so it's particularly attractive for them to serve a block Sonic misses.

$90/month is still amazing, but I think AT&T's strategy is going to be much like Comcast's: $90/month for internet only, or $95/month for internet + network television. Either way you're going to be paying for the network television. But they want to induce you to be "officially" served so they have something to sell to the networks and advertisers.

> The lineman said AT&T had him installing fiber in a more-or-less haphazard manner. I guess AT&T is literally freaking out, trying to catch up and perhaps head-off Sonic as best they can.

When ATT did my street (in San Jose), they had cables labeled and made for each street with the right length drops to connect at each pole. It may seem haphazard, but there's enough planning in getting the cables made that there's probably some reason to the madness. Their FTTN was a mess of different speed tiers, many of which wouldn't be available for a given user, perhaps the precise cabling reduced costs enough for FTTH to be cost competitive enough to get installed instead.

Not an American, so could someone tldr me what makes Sonic.net interesting? Just better than Comcast/VZ/etc?

One of the first to deploy residential and small business gigabit Internet connectivity at affordable prices. Strong respect for customer privacy.

They back their words up with actions. Basically, an ethical, value-to-the-customer organization and business model. (As of a couple of years ago; I'm out of touch.)

I'll add, also a local/regional player. Good for competition.

P.S. In the U.S., having such a choice in terms of a provider and value for service, is actually rather unusual. People who don't have something like Sonic in their area (me, for one) and who know anything about ISP's and what they provide, look on longingly.

Google's Fiber offer almost made it to my area. Sigh... so close, and yet so far.

Worlds better. Not an exploitative wannabe-monopoly. Their service is way more reliable. And if something goes wrong, when you call tech support you get a smart person who knows things and has power to fix problems.

Sonic.net customer here. Why I give them my money:

1) https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/ The company is politically outspoken and well aligned with the interests of its customers.

2) Their customer service is actually knowledgeable, empowered and downright pleasant to engage with. The only frustration I've had is whenever they've had to delegate work to AT&T.

I'll also note that, though the DSL service is obviously not very fast, it has had excellent uptime and consistency for me. I'm consistently able to stream HD video (1080p 30fps, 900p 60fps) without interruption. Contrast this to local cable where many people complain about poor streaming performance around peak times, despite much 'faster' service.

As much as 12-14Mbps is limiting, you genuinely get that performance nearly always.

I'm not currently a Sonic.net customer[1], but what I liked about them was most importantly they know how to run their network, and have good peering and transit: they don't do PPPoE, or have wrong MTUs set (ATT's devices advertise a 1480 MTU for 6rd based IPv6, even though the MTU they actually accept is 1472, and they also rate limit sending of needs frag packets). They have a customer forum where their network and service teams interact with customers for those things that are broken, but not broken enough to call support. The CEO is active in the forums as well.

[1] Sonic doesn't serve my area directly, so I had to pick between (discontinued) line shared 6mbps ADSL1 and resold ATT uverse at 45mbps; and then 1gbps became available, so I went with that.

I was debating about getting it and curious if it really makes that world a difference? Does a gigbit connection make the internet substantially better?

It's almost double the cost of MonkeyBrains another provider that has a strong net neutrality position, custom service, and etc.

My friends with MonkeyBrains grumble about variable bandwidth availability and poor customer service. Sonic has been rock solid for me on both accounts.

Personally, I expect the gigabit connection to make a pretty modest difference for me vs my current ADSL. The main problem it'll solve for me is backups, which take too long to run. It'll also make it much easier to stream audio and video from my home server to other spots when I'm traveling.

I will admit, variable bandwidth availability has been painful sometimes. Sometimes I just want to watch a movie and it's like crawl.

Not sure if that's worth an extra $500/year though for gigabit.

If I'm reading things rightly, it's about $700/year for gigabit. [1] I'm paying something like the same for Sonic's ADSL, so it's a no-brainer for me.

[1] http://hoodline.com/2017/05/sonic-now-offering-gigabit-fiber...

Yes, Sonic's DSL offerings are quite expensive.

I went from ADSL to fiber (both provided by sonic). It is really quite something. The speed is rad (I can't compare it to something like, say 500 mbit, but compared to DSL it's amazing) - I can download a whole steam game or a stupid xcode multi-gigabyte update in a couple of minutes. The latency is also really, really good - my ping times went way down also.

Another thing to think about is that although the upload speed is asymmetric (only 100 Mbit up), it is quite speedy enough for me to run my plex server in a mode that lets me watch my content from wherever.

In any case, I work remote and do a lot of video conferences (hangouts mostly, some skype), and the transition from ADSL to gigabit fiber was huge there, and is definitely the biggest benefit I've seen. My videoconferencing is now pretty solid. Any dropouts or hangups are the fault of the other end of the connection (as far as they can be attributed at least), whereas on DSL I'd get a lot more dropouts.

Happy to see this hit the front page.

I wanted to share this with the users at https://forums.sonic.net who have been pining for maps but you need a Sonic.net account to post. If anyone is willing to share, I'd appreciate it.

I posted it to the Access forum there.

Thanks for the map, it is now clear to me that they will not get to many of the hills of the city for quite some time.

If you want this in your Bay Area town/region you should write your city council. There are a lot of older neighbors who oppose new poles / new right of ways so it's good for the City Council to hear voices that support fiber.

http://projects.timesfreepress.com/2014/05/epb/gig/gig.html

not worth a PR (cos it's opinion and a specific application), but if you have aria2c on your machine you can do something like:

aria2c -i permiturls.txt

to download file lists.

wget supports the same :)

ah, I had a feeling one of the more common methods did... i even checked the curl man page but not wget's :(

You could also xargs -n 1 curl -O <permiturls.txt. No need for special tools :)

Why doesn't Sonic have a map like this on their webpage? They could even add a second color for "coming soon" streets.

Wow I'm 1/2 block away from a fiber line. How do I convince Sonic to do my street?

There are examples of complaints about this on Sonic's forums[0] If you're not parallel to a line you might be out of luck.

[0] https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1085&start=131...

yeah, a lot of the problems with the fiber rollout (I am not affiliated with Sonic, but I'm in their fiber zone and read a lot of their statements about fiber as they were starting up) is that you're limited by overhead wires, ground-level distribution boxes, and a number of other things that make infrastructure hard to build, somewhat understandably. Like, I happen to be lucky as the road I'm on is parallel to and one block east of a road with no fiber.

I believe the initial rollout was also a function of current subscriber density, like if they could count on converting N customers per street, it was a more compelling argument.

If you have line-of-sight to a utility pole, would it be possible for them to mount some gear on it and give you point-to-point wifi?

Looks like it's just san francisco? Might want to alter the title.

Very cool... The map comes pretty close to my house so I put in my address and they allowed me to preorder for October.

Thanks!

Neat stuff!

I'm pretty sure I saw them out there today stringing some up on my street, and it's reflected on the map.

2 blocks from where I live... dammit! So close, and yet so far...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com