Sonic.net CEO: We Delete User Logs After Two Weeks. Your ISP Should, Too.

I presume you're referring to their DSL service, in which case performance depends upon the distance between your home and their access node.

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/r26910859-New-Fusion-a...

No DSL provider can do that. Speeds depend on your distance from their facilities. To their credit, they tell you your distance when you fill out the service availability form, which you can use to get a rough idea of the quality of service you can expect.

I'd say sonic offers the best DSL service of any provider. I switched from att to sonic and got much better speeds over the same lines, probably thanks to a better backend setup. This privacy policy is another example of that.

With Sonic, I get 26/6 using annex B near a CO with the two-line bonded fusion dsl at one site. ($80/mo; the next step up would be $1k/mo for 30/30)

6/1 at another site, so there we use Comcast Business instead.

Note the "up to". Also that they probably give you ATM throughput, which adds 20% overhead to IP throughput. But the most important factor you're missing is distance; see these graphs: http://www.pcinpact.com/news/71764-vdsl2-sfr-fibre-optique-f...

couldn’t agree more. and after reading this and looking into it a bit, as well as seeing all the praise coming-in, really wish they operated in my area. here's to hoping an expansion to the east coast doesn’t take too long.

Assignment of IP addresses, through DHCP or other methods.

DSL and dial-tone are completely separate services, that only share a copper line. Verizon doesn't require you to purchase dial-tone in order to get DSL. The only reason I can think of for AT&T to do so is to prop up their telephone business.

You are wrong. After getting a special number ( 1-800-288-2020) i was able to order dsl from att without a landline contract and phone taxes from California. Nothing.

Catch is, the advertised price of $25/mo for 6mbps only last one year, and you have to sign up for two years, paying $55/mo on the second.

Still beats paying $40 all around for the crappy cable latency i get here (at One block from the att repeater building!)

My gripe is that I want DSL only. They say this:

DSL service: $40

Phone service: Free

Actual bill comes in:

DSL service: $40

Phone service taxes: $3

Phone service fees, surcharges etc, discretionary, levied by Sonic whose entire proceeds go back to them: $12

ie the "Free" phone service I do not want and do not use costs an extra 30%. If they were honest they would say this:

DSL service: $40

Mandatory phone service: $12 (no additional usage charges)

Mandatory taxes: $3

Yes.

I've always been fascinated by the 'show me the tax' mindset. I'm probably in the minority but an all inclusive, up front pricing structure will always make me happier than one that has a base + taxes + fees.

I have no illusions of being able to convince you that one pricing structure is 'better' than another. But there are a lot of us out there who really don't want to know about all the components of the price.

Oh cool... Polish government tried to enforce 10 or 15 years. We were discussing whether to keep it for them as printouts in 4 points font, or just as single copies of cheapest dvds ;) Thankfully, they were not allowed to do that.

Many of our programmers and writers agree. We're an advertising-based business (free online news) so I view this as one consequence of that

A small chunk of these are due to social and other 3rd party features, a good chunk plain old analytics tracking, and another small chunk are due to our "brand lift" advertising guarantees (e.g. in some cases its ensured that readers are actually seeing your below-the-fold advertisements before we charge you for them).

That said, yes, more than a few Ghostery hits are so we can, e.g., buy an ad to reach Forbes readers when you're visiting Adweek.com or something. Ghostery is great and a useful instruction tool for showing the "boiling frog" that is pixels.

My name is Alex Poon. I am the head of engineering at Visual Revenue. Being a provider of analytics and optimization services, it is hard, if not impossible to piggyback on other data providers for data. We pay great attention to user experience of our customers and work to ensure that we don't cause any delay or breakage to their sites. Regarding individual user logs, we delete them immediately after data is aggregated.

> I think that's a little excessive, especially for an article about keeping logs.

Well, it's a corporate decision on the part of Forbes, so there's no point in blaming the journalist who wrote this particular article.

maybe you should recommend them some other tracking sites, so that they can add them to their collection ;)

Most people I know in Mountain View have the Comcast Business internet connection, which is basically a different company from Comcast. (Different customer service, different billing, different equipment, etc.) Apparently you can even negotiate the rate down to $75 a month, which is a lot less than I pay for Time Warner's "we are a monopoly so fuck you with a stick" package in Brooklyn.

In theory, they can serve most of the state: http://www.sonic.net/sales/maps/ but in practice, DSL distance limits apply. I would expect most densely populated areas of the northern SF bay counties, most especially the Santa Rosa area to be well served. OTOH, the 805(SLO) & 661(Bfd) area codes appear to be lagging.