You Don’t Want ISPs to Innovate

If you'll allow me to pimp my ISP for a moment, depending on where you live in the Bay Area, there's reason to celebrate, not gripe. I don't know of a finer DSL provider in the U.S. than Sonic.net, a local ISP based in the North Bay, providing service to San Francisco and a growing number of cities on the Peninsula, as well.

I've been a customer since 2005 and have only had one incident of downtime, an admittedly frustrating week of up-and-down service that turned out to be a failing modem, which they replaced free of charge. The few times I've had to contact them for technical support, I've been connected to a knowledgeable support person in Santa Rosa in just a few minutes or less. They even provide phone support on Saturdays until 9pm.

Their CEO regularly interacts with customers on Twitter (http://twitter.com/dane). During the period when my modem was failing, I complained to @sonicnet and @dane on Twitter, and received email from Dane himself within the hour. He even called me the next day (I believe it was a Saturday) and told me that he'd been personally monitoring my line, and had made some tweaks to my DSL configuration to test some theories about what was wrong. (For the record, it was also he who first guessed that my modem was failing, which turned out to be the correct diagnosis.) And it's not like I'm a major Twitter personality, either: I only have 70-some followers.

Anyway, I could go on about their excellent customer service, but you get the point.

Sonic.net recently started offering what they call their "Fusion 2" product in San Francisco, which is a bonded (two-line) ADSL2+ service that doubles your up- and downstreams. I'm a bit far from the CO, so I "only" get 17/1.25 on my bonded line, but apparently some customers get upwards of 30mbps down. I could always use more, but it's enough to make me less envious of the Comcast DOCSIS3 service, anyway. I'm paying $70/mo for my Fusion 2 service (up from about $60/mo that I was previously paying for my 6/768k service), which is well worth it for me. They've even reduced my pricing in the past, unprompted by me: one day I just received an email from them that said, "Hey, starting next month you'll be paying less for your service."

They're about to change their pricing to a 2-tier model: $50/mo for "up to 20mbps" (as fast as you can go on one pair, basically) and unlimited US voice (POTS, not VOIP); and $100/mo for "up to 40mbps" on two pairs with two voice lines. They're grandfathering in all of their current bonded customers at their current rates if they don't want the voice lines. They're also rolling out support for Annex M, which doubles your upstream for a small hit on your downstream. Sonic.net is the kind of ISP that lets you get technical if you know what you're doing, so they're going to let customers toggle Annex M support on and off from the "member tools" webpage at the customer's whim.

So, tl;dr version: Sonic.net is a fantastic DSL-based ISP. I still get jealous of DOCSIS3 speeds, but supporting an excellent local company with an engaged, technical CEO and peerless customer service is worth the tradeoff, in my estimation. And in any case, they're apparently considering offering up to 4 copper pairs in the future, and are currently building a fiber network in Sebastopol to test the waters in the fiber market, as well. If they end up bringing FTTC to SF, my life will be complete....

Oh, and for the record, I sent this Wired article to Dane and he seemed to agree with it, which is nice to hear from the CEO of a growing ISP. (This was his response: http://twitter.com/dane/status/16991940057)