Gigabit Internet for $80
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I now live in Tokyo; I enjoy synchronous gigabit fiber access for a similar price. (It's actually closer to $50, but that's because my whole building is wired for it, and the building management has negotiated a group price.)
The difference is, here in Japan, pretty much anybody in any major metro area can get cheap gigabit Internet service (or synchronous 100Mbps at the very least). That's because here we do have a level of (intelligent) regulation; precisely the kind of regulation that this article points out the FCC eliminated during the Bush administration. There can obviously only be a tiny number of companies who run last-mile cables (telco and electric utilities here). So if those companies aren't required to reasonably resell that acess, you will never achieve the kind of competitive landscape that drives rapid progress.
It's pretty awesome that Sonic is able to do this in sleeply little Sebastopol, but it's pretty sad that most of America languishes under with barbarously primitive connection speeds of just a few Mbps because of its dysfunctional government.
EDIT: My anecdote about their service harkens back to when DSL was fairly new. My connection was flaking out one day, so I called. It rang twice. "Hello, Sonic.net." What, no menu tree? I explained the gist of the problem. "Do you mind if I connect to your DSL modem and check it out?" Of course not. "OK, I'm seeing the problem. Some of these units unfortunately shipped with slightly incorrect settings. I've updated those for you; is it working now?" It was. Total time on the phone was maybe 90 seconds. Even getting a human on the phone in that time was pretty astonishing (and still is).
But they do appear to be doing it right: instilling the right attitude in their employees and treating them properly so that they stick around.
The better argument is that the providers of last mile are beneficiaries of prior regulation which meant that they were able to build a gov’t-protected monopoly.
The latter is a legitimate but, to me, not dispositive. We want competition on the last mile (and every mile) and line-sharing regulation simply cements incumbents, as no new entrant would desire to be in a business of regulated rates.
Now, we might simply accept that prior damage has ruined that market beyond repair and the least-bad solution is to force line-sharing. But I’d rather see lots of Sonic’s building a new set of last miles.
If we are going to live in economically infeasible locations, relying on government subsidy to pay $30m/mi to build highways to shuttle us to work, then we are going to have to rely on subsidy for other aspects of our lives as well. The regulation/subsidy-free ship sailed about the time we started the national highway project, collectively bought an automobile company, etc.
PS: If you’re on city water chances are you’re fairly cheap to wire up to a modern network. Unfortunately the incumbent players tend to also be selling you service on the old network so they have vary little incentive to upgrade you especially if it might lead to you dropping some extras.
There are many well known economies of scale to denser urban agglomerations that suburbanization forfeits. That's not controversial. What is controversial is why suburban living, despite its much higher cost compared to city living, has nevertheless come to dominate post-war America.
Highways are paid for overwhelmingly by user fees (largely fuel taxes), not general revenue. On the federal funding side it's over 90%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Finan...
There's little to no evidence that the Interstate Highway System couldn't be self-sustaining if that were desirable. As it is, the federal government decides instead that about 1/6 of the money raised by fuel taxes and other fees should go to public transit, and states prefer to get their funding contribution from property and other taxes.
> Since 1947, the amount of money spent on highways, roads and streets has exceeded the amount raised through gasoline taxes and other so-called “user fees” by $600 billion (2005 dollars), representing a massive transfer of general government funds to highways.
$600 billion 2005 dollars over 64 years? That's an average of less than $10B/year for a system that serves literally every American, either directly or indirectly through the goods that are delivered by trucking.
Even if road spending has been growing faster than the rate of inflation, that would still be a bargain at twice the price. If I were a properly motivated advocacy group, I bet I could produce a number with a T at the end of it and somewhat plausibly claim its the economic activity currently dependent on the asphalt transportation system.
It takes a real ideological bent to call that a "massive transfer of general government funds". After all, some of those general government funds are filling in gaps left by drivers subsidizing train, bus, and subway passengers. Presumably a not insignificant chunk of the rest represents municipal costs, where it's hard to use tolls or gas taxes to build local roads that literally everyone uses even if they're just biking to the train station.
So I'm not arguing that it's a natural monopoly, just pointing out that with the existing government regulation that limits the number of entities that may run last-mile cable, we won't see effective competition unless those restrictions are balanced by requirements for shared access.
I too would love to somehow have a whole bunch of companies able to lay cable right to my house, but I doubt that will happen. Managing such right-of-way is actually a very hard problem to solve (which is why governments regulate it in virtually (literally?) every country. So I think that's an unlikely outcome.
Note: I'm not talking about access to the vast majority of unpopulated area that is the rural US; I'm talking about the well-established high-density urban areas.
I switched to Comcast and got faster-than-rated speeds at a totally reasonable price.
I live in San Francisco. I've been reaching out to my supervisor about this community fiber thing, but to no avail. In the meantime, he goes along with AT&T's plan to install 100s of refrigerator-sized boxes on sidewalks, to provide their "uverse"-brand Internet (which is not GbE). A handful of citizens -vs- highly-paid suits of AT&T? Citizens always lose.
Here's the problem with letting AT&T build out these boxes: they then become a monopoly. If Sonic wants to come in and provide fiber, they also need 100s of such boxes. And then Comcast. And maybe MonkeyBrains (there is such an ISP here). And so on. This is not sustainable! You can't have every ISP putting up large boxes on sidewalks!
A solution is for the City to lay fiber and maintain it; and then you buy access from AT&T/Sonic/MonkeyBrains/Comcast. Only 1 set of boxes; and Internet access can come from any of the myriad gateways available. As for funding: thats what bonds are for. And plus: the increase in property values will pay for this in no time at all (via increased tax revenues).
But trying to convince the politicians to listen to a citizen is impossible. They just go along with the lobbyists, who are just looking after their own short-term interests.
We got Sonic for the reddit office and it is awesome. One day, a Sonic rep stopped by, unannounced, just to make sure everything was satisfactory. It was amazing.
Their service was absolutely amazing. No phone menus, techs who wouldn't make you run through their script if you knew what was going on, simple pricing. I miss having them as my ISP.
(The 4 static IPs were pretty awesome too)
I have 20mbps FiOS, and I feel like my connection is almost never the limiting factor in delays online. Sites that are actually serving at full speed load in a fraction of a second. Lots of sites are slow, but it's almost always the server side or intervening networks (overseas sites, etc.)
For the vast majority of content, 20 reliable mbps completely meets my needs. I can stream HD video with no buffering. I can download ISO images in much less time than it takes to boot a VM. My Dropbox syncs within a few seconds: I can't recall actually having to wait for a file to be available.
Not saying that gigabit internet isn't awesome. But I don't feel like connection speed is the major bottleneck on the internet experience right now for those who can get a > 15mbps connection. I'd rather focus on expanding the availability of that, before we move on to the next tier of bandwith-heavy applications.
I have a 14.4, and I feel like the BBS's and AOL chat rooms I frequent struggle to keep up. What could I possibly need double the speed for??
Not saying 28.8k isn't great, but the internet just doesn't need speeds like that yet. Better to focus on getting everyone up to 14.4k first.
But in any optimization scenario, you eliminate bottlenecks first. I question whether the ISP to home link is the bottleneck in the modern internet experience the way it was in 1998.
Even more new scenarios shake out when work, home, and most of your friends' and family members' homes are so linked.
When connections get orders of magnitude faster, it becomes about doing new things, in addition to doing the old things faster.
I surf the web the same way with 1Gbps fiber in Tokyo as I did a few years ago with 3Mbps DSL in Ithaca, NY. But surfing the web is just a small part of what I do via the Internet nowdays.
The companies that are trying to do remote-gaming are probably having issues with bandwidth.
The days it took to upload my music collection to Google Music all argue it is.
Bandwidth isn't the only bottleneck, but it's holding some technology back.
I don't believe I've even approached saturating 20Mbps with multiple users in the house streaming multiple video streams and downloading as much data as they could. The other end and the in-between-bits has always been a limiting factor and has been once you get over about T-1 speeds.
Put another way, buffering in software for 28.8 was usually needed because your end couldn't stream something like a 3 minute song smoothly. Buffering on a 28Mbps connection is because the provider can't stream something like a 3 minute hi-def music video smoothly.
In principle I'd love gigabit Internet, but I honestly wouldn't know what to do with it.
Just because you can't think of things doesn't mean they don't exist :-) And once they do exist they'll seem obvious to you.
Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else. Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room?
All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.)
Dream big.
"I can saturate a 100mbps connection by booting a diskless computer. Why shouldn't our operating systems/environments be stored "in the cloud"?"
Clouds go down, your computer goes down. There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud". Your data? Maybe, if you can handle not having access to it every second of the day. And even today, one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably on a 20Mbps connection provided all the "cloudy" parts of the internet behave. More importantly, if the server and the links between you and the server aren't capable of giving you 100mbps then you can't saturate the connection.
"Why shouldn't I have more than one computer in my house?"
How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this?
"Remind me again why I can't have cameras all over my house and see them all at once while somewhere else."
Why can't you do that today? Streaming 1080p from x-number of cameras, multiplexed into a single display that's probably no better than 1080p is silly. The proper approach, regardless of bandwidth, is to downsample the displays before multiplexing at the broadcast side. Then you're just streaming a single video stream anyways, which is perfectly doable at 20Mbps.
"Why shouldn't I be able to speak to an SO wondering around the house doing chores while I'm in a hotel room?"
Again, why can't you do that today? There's no reason to stream video from empty parts of the house. In your use-case, you're only sending one or two video streams at a time anyway...again still healthily within the realm of 20Mpbs.
"All that aside, think of the games and entertainment that can be enabled. TVs are large enough to be almost life size now. Why shouldn't I be able to stand in front of one with a doctor or Amazon employee on the other side being able to examine each other, products, packaging etc in high resolution detail. (Note 1080 is not even close to high resolution for life size.)"
This is the only compelling case you've provided I think, but bandwidth is not the principle problem in this use-case. Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case.
And yes, you'll have to compress even at 1gbps. A 1920x1080 display with 24bit color at 60fps is something like 3GigaBytes per second or around 24gbps.
The next gen of TV is likely to be some variant of super hi-vision which is 7680x4320. @24bit and 60fps that's just shy of 48Gigabytes per second uncompressed or 384gbps.
So yeah, bandwidth will be a bottleneck in those applications, but 1gbps is not even close to handling it and I'm guessing the hardware required to real-time encode and compress video for a stream like that is astronomical.
So what? How much useful stuff do you think I can actually do at the computer without a net connection? (Software developers are a little different, but even then there have been projects where a net connection is required to be at all productive.)
Note that it would not be law that your OS has to be remote. Not everyone would do it. But it isn't even an option today.
> There's no compelling reason to put the OS "in the cloud"
That it becomes someone else's problem to maintain is a nice one. So that it is available to me no matter where I go is nice. So that it can be demand loaded as I use bits instead of going through a multi-hour install that installs everything despite me not using a lot of it.
> .. one can RDP or VNC perfectly comfortably ..
Only if the latency is low, and you don't do 3D graphics or anything involving large screen updates. When the process and graphics card are local, they can provide superb interactive response. (I have a long history with both protocols, and even hardware acceleration for RDP - still poor performance.)
> How does not having a 1Gbps internet connection prevent this?
I meant having more than one computer demand downloading its OS. And by computer I mean almost everything with a microprocessor.
> .. multiplexed into a single display .. downsample .. reason to stream video from empty parts of the house ..
I didn't ask "how can I compromise to fit things into little bandwidth". If I had a choice between one or two cameras at a time and low quality versus all the cameras and very high quality then I'll pick the latter.
At one time 640k was enough for everyone. You could shoe horn everything most people did into that. But when given the option of more displays, more fidelity, quicker interactive response, I'll take them every time over compromises.
> Everything from cameras to encoders to compressors to display devices are a bigger problem in this case
That is all part of the chicken and egg problem. If the bandwidth isn't widely available then there won't be that much demand. There are other encoding solutions other than full "frames" - eg deltas only for random parts of the frame updated on demand at differing rates rather than having one frame rate for the whole frame. Eye tracking can determine the area to pay most attention to.
I would say not very, while one can code without the net. The lack of libraries, documentation and other resources would make most projects a pain, if said lack extended past an hour or so. Further a lot of the software being developed, itself relies on connectivity. Now there are special focuses like embedded where it would not be as much of a pain to loose connectivity, but for 70% (I made that statistic up) of what I do as a software developer, I would probably just walk away from the machine until it regained connectivity, depending on whether I was deep in a code groove or gluing stuff together, if it's gluing then, the machine is useless without a connection.
Regardless of need, once you have fiber to your building, 1Gbps and 20Mbps cost the same. It's getting something other than a POTS circuit that makes the difference.
For instance, I (regularly) upload my 20~60GB VMWare VM files between my house and the office, because I don't want to carry a computer/disk around with me. At work, I tend to have a bunch of Remote Desktop connection to my home machines, which I leave up 24/7, as its not enough bandwidth to make a perceptible difference. And while most backup services like CrashPlan or Mozy or whatever definitely are the bottleneck, if you are backing up to your own remote servers, or to AWS via something like Arq, the speed really makes a difference, just as much as with a LAN (at least up to 100Mbps with AWS, anyway... at that point I think they become the gating factor).
I agree you don't get a huge benefit when surfing normal Internet websites, and that the benefits break down when the remote end of the connection is international, but for stuff like the above, the faster the better.
Yes, higher bitrate makes better pictures, but for TV, over the air is currently the best way to get network programming in the least compressed format.
Memo to Frontier Communications: THIS is how you do it. You can beat Verizon at their former game, get Sonic.net to show you how. (Or, even better, get Sonic.net to take over your FiOS operations in the Pacific Northwest...)
The point I was making is that one of the most expensive parts of getting fiber to the home is laying the cable. In this case they were able to do a 'test' run to a neighborhood where they could just relatively cheaply run the cable above ground. I hope that their cost structure still works when moving towards more expensive rollouts, but given how we have seen other fiber rollouts get scaled back or fail I'm not so sure.
I have a simple explanation for that: A regulatory and commercial environment that was clearly not going their way. Verizon spends something like $1,000 to install FiOS at your house, then a few hundred dollars a year in hardware, bandwidth, etc. To make that work for them economically, they need customers paying an average of $100+/month and preferably even more over time.
But how does Verizon get your $100+ when you watch all your TV on NetFlix, Hulu or iTunes? That's pretty obviously the way things are heading, though it may take another decade. Now all you want from Verizon is an IP pipe, and good luck convincing customers that "Internet only" should cost as much as "Internet + TV + Phone". And an Obama-appointed FCC is unlikely to allow Verizon to demand a cut of NetFlix or Apple's revenue for use of "full bandwidth": That's what the Net Neutrality fight was always about.
Without their own services to sell, the capital cost of laying and maintaining a "dumb pipe" didn't look so good.
I think Apple is going to have a go at solving this problem for the providers: "Let us take over the user experience (i.e., the hardware and software) and in return we'll give you a new way to package your services that guarantees a healthy revenue stream regardless of how consumers are getting their content." Just think how much more money AT&T makes from the average iPhone subscriber vs. the average dumb phone subscriber and you'll have the right idea.
I think Frontier realized what you just wrote: Being a "dumb pipe" provider--especially when your company took on a pile of debt to "buy" both aging copper and new-fangled fiber--is not a strategy for success. So now, they figure they've got the TV equipment, so why not go for it?
Personally, and this is apparently me having a minority opinion, I utterly despise Hulu, NetFlix, et al. Why? None of them has matched the ease of use of my TiVo connected to a linear cable lineup. Television is supposed to be an "idiot box" and for me and the other two people in my household, TiVo + FiOS TV = astoundingly easy.
How many unique TV channels are there in America? OTA and cable. Maybe 2,000? With a ton of redundancy in the programming. What if Apple simply recorded all of them into that big fancy data center? No need for a DVR: Now you can stream anything your cable provider offers any time after it airs whether you have a "season pass" or not.
There will probably be a few annoying restrictions (Shows disappear after two weeks?) and you'll probably have to watch ads. But as far as I can guess, it's the only way Apple can give you time-shifted access to non-streaming programming (e.g., the NFL) without reinventing TiVo, which I'm pretty sure they don't want to do.
It all hinges on whether they can get the contracts ironed out. But the cable/fiber companies will see dollar signs from more expensive "Apple TV" plans (with two year contracts to make the set cheaper?) and the networks may be swayed by the promise that customers will have to watch ads, or pay them to make the ads go away.
I've heard everything from geography (even in NYC, one of the densest population on Earth, we couldn't get it together for consumer gigE) to culture (yes, culture! As I understand it from various explanations, we're too culturally "heterogeneous" for gigE connections. No seriously.)
I wonder how Sonic made the highly improbable not only possible but, apparently, profitable?
NYC is not even close to the densest population on Earth - it's not even in the top 50. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+population+den...
It's also an incredibly expensive place to install anything since all the wires are underground, and on top of that you have to do night work, and it has very high labor rates.
Manhattan is probably the last place to get this sort of thing.
It's actually meant consolidating a lot of my non-critical stuff back home, I've been able to decommission a couple of Linodes and AWS instances in favor of a machine running XEN in the closet.
Update: the initial version of this article mistakenly listed the price of Sonic's gigabit service at $79.95; it is actually $69.95.
That's amazing. Here I thought I was getting a bargain with 15Mbps SDSL for $25 per month (our mid-rise condo building in downtown San Jose, CA struck a deal with our ISP if some percentage of residents signed up).
I noticed Hamilton Ontario (and much of it's south-easternly towns) of all places has unlimited 100mbps available via Shaw Hamilton. That only costs ~$100/month: http://www.shawhamilton.ca/index.php?internet
I am seriously considering moving to hamilton after I move out of this place literally just for the internet connection.
Also... 5 megabit upload hurts when you have 100 megabit down.
It's 100mbps download and 5mbps upload.
The only thing that has changed within the last year is the are charging $5 more per month for the same speed with a 300GB limit. That's what this URL says at least, I registered years ago and got the unlimited and thankfully they haven't cut me off: http://www.telus.com/content/standalone/cityplace/internet.h...
(errr, uhhh, wow... I was wrongly mistaken, looks like it's $100/month or $60 more per month for the 300GB cap of 100mbps download now... wow.. I am only paying $40/month for unlimited but that's a 2 year old contract.)
Unfortunately for me I am leaving in a few days :S
If you take the UK as an example, a lot of the country (outside major cities and metropolitan areas) is still stuck on 512kbit. The same is true worldwide with even parts of SA on dialup. Shouldn't we be concentrating on throwing more resources into getting these connections usable rather than feeding crazy large bandwidth to the rich?
As the broadband speeds are controlled pretty much by consumer demand, isn't it better to have more people than an elite few?
On the same subject, I'm sitting here on approximately 12Mbits and I genuinely have no problems with it streaming HD iPlayer and with three computers on it. I don't need any faster and it costs a whopping $20 a month equiv (unmetered consumption).
Also, if you consider the cost of bandwidth and caps thrown on people in Europe, a gig connection would suck up your entire allocation in about 48 seconds...
Now let's deal with the remote people problem. There are already efforts underway to more efficiently service outlying areas. These generally revole around WiMax and things like Lightspeed (although that looks dead for the moment). People who live far from cities will not be served as well. That's they way it will always be do to the economics of population density, hence the reason that serving those environments typically include long range wireless. Second, since when do we need to get everyone at the same level before we move forward? Would we be where we are now in personal computing if we stopped in 1996 to make sure everyone had a computer before we built faster ones? We can continue in the same way we have with universal access fees supporting access to non-city dwellers, but that's no reason to prevent progress in cities.
But 10mbit is definitely not enough to use the internet effectively, hell, my HDTV soaks up that much just watching any a generic HD channel, if you had 2 TVs running it would slow to a crawl.
I know in America we have the completely stupid system where electricity is at a regulated rate but privately provided by a given monopoly company at any given household.
That is actually another example of the problem. If governments didn't suck, and our collective interests were not clouded and in general ill thought, we would have fiber to the home be a national works project to help pull the country out of the recession.
It is currently so expensive to lay fiber because the demand and supply are in this convoluted state, where no one demands it due to the monopolies so no one makes it in great quantity so prices are artificially high so no one wants it.
If we had a gov't project to lay fiber, the massive demand (unless the gov't did the entire supply chain like they did with the NHS) would spur industry growth, and we could then export our huge fiber industry (which is high tech manufacturing, like carbon nanotubes would be in bulk) to everyone else and actually have industry again.
Of course, that would never happen, because governments almost never do anything right. And if they do it right, they do it insanely over budget and late. But it is nice to dream.
I think it might possibly work at the local level. It doesn't have the huge instantaneous demand boom of the material as a national project, but regions that have access to the raw components used in fiber tubing (sand is a silica right? Not pure enough I assume, we make the stuff somewhere out of silicates though) could subsidize and start the industry, and then sell the company after they spur demand by using their own fiber supply to give every home 100 gigabit internet connections.
Fast forward a decade and the initial cost investment to build the industry would be paying dividends in national productivity and the export market we would have for fiber. Rather than go from (on average) 56 kbps internet in 2000 to 300kbps in 2012, we could have a third of the population on fiber in a decade.
It really comes back to infrastructure. Nobody makes subways or national transit systems or lays railroads across the nation unless there is a huge unrealistic demand that forces businesses to act or if the collective power of representational government uses the investment potential of taxpayers to create and fund the services that make everyone's lives better but no one can justify giving on a case by case basis for a quick profit in the next quarter financial report.
Alas, pipe dreams. I wish I had sonic, I get the lovely fun of picking between the staunchly competitive only ISP in my area that provides single banded DSL at 300 kbps for $50 over the copper phone lines that have been in the ground for half a century. God bless America.
It's a nice model, but costs more in total than other arrangements. My house is going to get hooked upto fibre this year, and I was checking up on this for my housing co-op, and the cheapest and best by far is to tie ourselves to a provider for five years and get a group deal. That way everyone in the house gets 100/100mbit for less than $20/month, and everyone can upgrade from that basic package to gigabit if they want, but that's currently costing ~$150 a month.
However, all of this is possible due to the Stockholm municipal fibre company, Stokab. They've been around for at least a decade now, digging up streets, laying fibre, hooking up buildings, and since they're making good profit, they're re-investing that into providing fibre for everyone in Stockholm.
The utilities have a vested interest to maintain a monopoly. They have been suing localities which put up muni fiber; and have bribed state legislators to pass laws banning community networks.
The Republicans have this belief that a 'free market' will fix everything. They claim that the government should not be competing with utilities by providing muni fiber; that the government has an unfair advantage. To them, it's irrelevant that the Internet falls under the heading of infrastructure, and not a luxury. They will do anything to prevent the government from getting into the business.
So, between the two, we're stuck in the dark ages.
So what are you really getting for $80/mo? If you try to really use (or abuse in some people's minds) that last mile gigabit, how long till you get cut or prompt crap like deep packet inspection and throttling? The "Internet" as we know it is a tricky thing.
I'd prefer something like 20mbps sync to the home that you're free to use as you see fit at that price point. The economics of this should work out fine.
Their CEO also said that bandwidth wasn't their biggest cost. (but I can't find the link...)
Particularly when you hear of countries outside the US, 100+ mbit Internet is a very relative thing and it depends very much on where that traffic is going.
I'm all for building out last-mile distribution with fiber, but what's possible on Cable and DSL is very good and adequate for the current generation of services if the policies would match what the technologies are capable of. The elephant in the room is that good Internet will continue to eat the lunch of Cable TV and phone. Bandwidth caps are more about keeping you in line as a "good consumer" than the economics of IP transit.
Hope Sonic builds a powerful network.
OVH is expanding into Canada too. Makes me quiet scared. They are like the walmart of the data industry.
Shame free's online.net is not competing outside of France.
That works out to a bit over 100mbps commit. A fair enough deal but nothing spectacular. Doing 10gbps ports is a neat marketing trick but I can't think of too many situations where you'd balloon that large and yet still sit within 40TB/mo where a gigabit port would be a serious bottleneck.
Just keep in mind the carriers are using at most 40gbit and 100gibt optical lines and trunking them together. If you wire an entire neighborhood with gigabit last mile, or a DC with 10gig to the node, it all coalesces somewhere at the network access points. For home subscribers, I'd much rather prefer a quality product in the 10s of mbit for the next few years, the only point I was originally trying to make. The argument for laying gigabit last mile has more to do with last mile life cycle IMHO than truly giving customers a full gigabit pipe at the moment.
10gbps makes sense if you also have 1gbps servers in their network.
BTW Sonic.net is $70/m. The article was mistaken.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of...
It has been done some places, however...
You were probably misled by the way the speedtest client reports the results though: "134 Mb/s" I have never seen megabits-per-second indicated that way; usually it would be "134 Mbps". But it's still "Mb" and not "MB" if you look closely.
But it was quite apparent that for Sonic, AT&T is a big problem. For most of their coverage area, they are still dependent upon AT&T to actually hook their customers up. And AT&T has no interest in maximizing your Sonic ADSL2+. They'd rather you buy VDSL/Uverse from them. I think this is what drove Sonic to start working in Fiber. Not only was it the only way to get gigabit speeds, but it was the best way for them to take control of their own destiny. When you own the fiber, you can make your customers happy. When you rely on AT&T for the copper lines, you are limited in what you can do.
(For the record, I'm in Redwood City and getting ~12Mbps down with 2 bonded lines from Sonic).