IAmA Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, Northern California's Largest Independent ISP | Hacker News Reader

IAmA Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic, Northern California's Largest Independent ISP

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168 pointsquantisan15 comments

I especially enjoyed the story of Sonic's founding https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/comment/dxu0km...

Relevant portion pasted below:

Regarding the founding, when Scott and I were at the Santa Rosa Junior College, he did a project in 1992 to provide dialup access to students, using this new OS called Linux. Linux had just gotten its first Ethernet interface driver support a week earlier (for the Western Digital 8003EP, a 10BASE2 thinnet card), it was very early, and under really active development - great for a student project. Active SRJC students could get dialup shell access for the semester and use Telnet, email, FTP, IRC, Gopher, etc.

Some months later we got a call from another college reporting that “one of your students is being rude on the Internet”, and would we please tell them to stop cussing at people on IRC. (Yes, the Internet was a kinder, gentler place back then.)

We looked up the student record and discovered a weakness in our signup scheme: the staff who ran the campus mainframe didn’t trust students like us with much access to records (think: WarGames style grade changes), so we allowed students to sign up with only a birthdate and SSN, and we asked the mainframe if that was a current student via a serial line, which squirted back a 0 or 1 (no or yes) to indicate enrollment status.

As things turned out, some student employees in registration had figured this out, and when an older student (Mildred) would sign up for aquatic aerobics at the local JC, the SSN and DOB was being put on a Post-It and sold to a student (Max) at the nearby high school. Max, as it turned out, liked to troll folks in IRC, leading to the discovery.

Asking around, we learned that the going rate for a stolen college login was $25, which led to a lightbulb moment: If people were stealing this thing, we could replicate what we’d built at the college and offer it commercially. Thus began Sonoma InterConnect (SON-IC, get it?).

I'm a huge Sonic fan, so this is great to see. I stuck with them on DSL for a long time just because a) I wanted a reliable, well-supported connection more than a flaky but nominally higher speed line, and b) I hate oligopolies, and did not want to give Comcast a nickel.

Now, though, I have their gigabit fiber and it's great. Less money, same great support, and much higher speeds. I feel very lucky to live in one of the few competitive ISP markets in the country. Free markets are great when there's real competition.

Dane seems like a straight shooter too, and I’m loving the top comment and reply,

Mtdew1489: Should I be worried when there is only one internet provider in my area, regardless of who it is?

Danejasper: Yes

No weaseling, no qualifying, just a principled stance.

That seemed like a bit of a softball question to me. I think it's unlikely Sonic is the only ISP in any of the areas they serve.

They seem to just trying to milk as much out of their DSL customers as possible, designed to push them to fiber. I used to have their DSL. Their DSL price was then raised to $55+ a month after the $40 introductory rate. The speed was not great at 3Mb/s, due to AT&T line quality. I've asked for a break due to the low speed but the response was the $40 was for new customers. It's a horrible deal even for $40. I finally bit the bullet and switched to Comcast on 100Mb/s for $50.

If I understand rightly, the economics of DSL are not great, because they have to pay AT&T a lot for the access. I agree that 3 Mb/s is not great; I was at 12, which seemed fine to me.

I still thought that was a much better deal that Comcast. I occasionally had to deal with other people's Comcast lines, and the poor quality and terrible support meant that I was happy to pay a lot more for a reliable connection with smart, effective people at the other end of the phone when I needed them.

I find it crazy how AT&T keeps trying to sell me the same DSL for more money with data caps than I pay Sonic.

At the time of the switch, I've checked out the options out there. There were other ISP renting out the AT&T line just like Sonic did who were charging $30 for the same DSL plan, and they seemed doing fine. That's the moment I realized Sonic was pricing the DSL that way to drive people to their fiber. But at that point I was tired of the slow DSL and just went with the Comcast cable.

Unfortunately I’m in the same boat. Love sonic as a company but they hiked the price of DSL up to the same as 60mbps Comcast. It’s getting harder to justify it. I’ll probably swallow my pride and switch to comcast soon.

I don’t think they’re doing this to push customers to fiber. I would gladly pay for fiber. It’s just not available. They’re doing it to fund the build out.

I just have no idea if it’s coming my way. I’d rather they raise investment capital to fund the buildout.

I found the WISP discussion interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8eccqb/im_dane_jasper...

I remember getting a call from Dane when we first got DSL from Sonic.net living in Benicia. He wanted to ask if the service was up and running to our satisfaction.

Great company, miss having them as my ISP.

I will be happy when I can buy their Gigabit product. Until then, Comcast has my business. :/

(Previously I was a very happy customer, but having children pushed me from being a "9Gbps is fine" customer to "ok, I need some serious bandwidth now" kind of guy.)

...I sure hope you meant 9Mbps, otherwise I and I assume many others here would be very jealous of a home 9Gbps connection and more jealous that you didn't think it was enough for some pretty light internetting :)

Sigh, yes. 9Mbps.

Bless you

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