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Comment by kinofcain | Hacker News Reader

Sonic is the only ISP I've ever had that hasn't sucked. They're terrific. Their techs actually know what they're talking about and, as I'm sure others on HN can relate to from dealing with other ISPs, they don't treat you like an idiot when you call up. It was a great decision by google to have sonic act as the ISP for the Stanford deployment. I hope they're able to roll fiber out quickly.

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they don't treat you like an idiot when you call up

The main reason this happens on most ISPs that that there are so many stupid-about-technology people out there that call up ISPs. There are loads of people who think they know all about technology and computers, and it turns out that they don't really know more than a few buzzwords. Hence the tech support flowchart has to assume (no matter what the customer says) that the customer doesn't know anything and that they should (e.g.) restart their PC.

They could at least have a procedure to make a note in your account that you're not an idiot after you've proved it to them, so you don't have to run through the same checklist every time you call.

Right now, the "non-bozo bit" is basically a thread-local session variable--it's stored in the head of the operator handling your call, so if they ask you to call back and you get them again, you can skip the procedure, but if you get someone else, you have to go through it all again.

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/806/

Part of this is probably due to Sonic's small size. The people answering the phone are actually engineers. With a big company like Comcast, the people answering the phone are trained to follow a specific (and often frustrating to the customer) algorithm to solve your problem.

I was the first person in my township to get FIOS. At that time, their customer service was excellent and in-line with what you both are saying. But over the past 5 years it has steadily degraded. The service itself is great, but you no longer quickly get the technical help you need.

Get FIOS Business service; not the residential. The technical help is more capable; but you pay for it.

I have Business service.

It's like Techsavvy in Canada, except I effectively get 3Mbps, not 1Gbps, from them :(.

Former sonic.net customer here, then speakeasy, current teksavvy customer. Speakeasy just isn't in the ballpark, teksavvy is great service, but sonic.net was hands-down the best ISP I've ever had.

This article makes me happy to read.

Novus in Vancouver is pretty awesome, 40/10 for $65/mo

Well, then they clearly have better support than service. The one apartment I've lived in that wasn't Comcast wired I suffered through a year of miserable latency, packet loss, and unimpressive speeds via Sonic DSL. Personally, I'll trade shit support for a decent connection any day.

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