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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

"Heavy" use is just using what they pay for. If they can't guarantee that they should sell a lesser tier of service. Otherwise this is just fraud.

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They paid for committed bandwidth? So they'd be paying $1000+/mo. But they're not.

I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. A Google PM got me on a call and asked me if I wanted 20 gigabit for $200 a month the other day. No restrictions, I could run my business off my $70 if I really wanted to.

I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.

I pay $50 for 10 gigabits from Sonic. I don’t abuse it by deliberately running a speed test 24/7 or anything like that. I do use it for anything I want, at any time, without pausing to consider how much data it takes. Launch a NAS backup at 2PM on a weekday? Stream 4K video on 2 TVs at the same time? Download a mass of software updates? Without a second’s hesitation. The CEO is on record being very explicit that they sell you Internet access so you can use it as you see fit.

I have the best ISP in the country. You can’t convince me otherwise.

This one is probably in contention:

https://epb.com/

Other than being 6x the price though.

I wonder if it’s because EBP is a utility and so has a mandate to run fiber to all homes in its area, as opposed to private ISPs that can pick and choose.

That could be. Sonic has pretty good coverage local from leasing fiber from AT&T. Even then there are still dead spots in my city where people are stuck with Comcast et al. They only recently rolled out their own fiber several months ago where I live. That day my speed went up 10x and the cost cut in half.

It's a no-brainer for people who live in their coverage area, yet as you say, their coverage isn't complete.

But it's still $50 for 10Gb where offered.

Sonic is still in business? Had DSL with them 20 years ago.

They are so very still in business.

I see they are still a tiny regional provider in Santa Clara county, Santa Rosa, and LA. Had them when I lived next to eBay HQ ~15 years ago. https://bestneighborhood.org/sonic-availability/

I think US internet would give you a run for your money on best ISP in the country. Been doing gigabit symmetrical for probably close to 10 years at very reasonable prices. When I called customer support about having a static IP, just ended up talking shop with whoever was on the other side. Amazing

Absolutely amazing ISP. A while back my power went out. About three minutes later I got a text message (not from PG&E!) but from Sonic: (something like ..) "We noticed your connection went down and are running automated diagnostics." a few minutes later I got another text message which informed me that other nearby hardware they operate has lost power so they presume that my building has also lost power. Just a delightful experience.

I'm so jealous. Every now and then I check to see if Sonic is available at my address, but I'm always disappointed. No one wants to spend the money to run fiber down my street, even though the trunk is a block away.

I've been pushing an average of 10 TiB per month through my Sonic 10 Gbps fiber, mainly upload. Never had an issue or complaint. And really, even if my XGS-PON fiber is split between 32 customers, that's still ~300 Mbps per customer, which I'm nowhere near hitting.

That’s cool but it won’t work if everyone in your zip code tries to do it.

Specifically the fraud is advertising gb service instead of 10mb99. QoS. It's as ridiculously as selling a prius that can do 200mph as little as 0 percent of the time.

They want to advertise their sevrice as meeting the federal broadband speed without having to actually build a network that can support it. That's fraud.

For a thousand dollars of dedicated bandwidth I'd expect more like 10Gbps.

And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.

I pay considerably less that that for colocated 1 Gbps, from a Tier 1 provider, which includes rack space, air conditioning, and power.

You're not actually getting 1Gbps 95%-ile.

Of course not, what a bad-faith argument. They're paying for an unlimited shared connection. If a lot of other people are using it, they'll get lower speeds. But if not, they should get the speed commensurate with the package they purchased, for whatever amount of time there's not enough contention to throttle them. If that means they pull 1Gbps for every second of every day of the month, so be it. If not, that's life.

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