9 ms·

Gigabit Internet for $80

275 points by Nogwater 15y ago

saryant 15y ago
Back when I lived in the North Bay (2001ish) I switched from SBC to Sonic.net for my DSL service. After setting up the new connection I got a call Dane Jasper asking if everything was satisfactory. Needless to say, I was completely blown away by this. 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)
- mbreese 15y ago
  For clarification, Dane Jasper is the CEO of Sonic. He still regularly answers posts on their forums too.
veidr 15y ago
I'm from Sebastopol; sonic.net is a truly great ISP. I've cited them as an example of great customer service in general, not just within the (typically awful) ISP industry. 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).
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  This is like TekSavvy in Toronto, at least in my experience. I call, less than one ring, "Billing press 1, Support press 2" 2 "Hello, TekSavvy Technical support" Hi, I can ping 4.2.2.2 but it seems I'm getting 96% packet loss and the web is completely unusable. "Mac, Linux or Windows" Linux. "Awesome. Can you check the dhcp settings" Sure, I just forget the command "dhclient" Awesome [...] Find out it is a problem with the cable box for the building in under 2 mins. If I were with rogers they probably would have had to send someone to my house to get this type of response.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    Correction, that's how Teksavvy used to be. However recently they've gotten too big to be able to offer that level of support. A few months ago hold times were up to 1-2 hours because they couldn't hire quick enough. They've since hired enough staff that the hold times are down but obviously it takes a while for staff to train up to that level. 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.
- mwsherman 15y ago
  The argument for forced sharing of the last mile isn’t that it’s a natural monopoly – that’s unempirical but commonly claimed. (Prior to FedEx and UPS, smart people thought package delivery was a natural monopoly.) 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.
  - oconnore 15y ago
    Suburbia in general is only possible with supportive regulation. There is a reason Sonic's business model has only developed in very dense neighborhoods (4000 person/mi^2 vs <1000p/mi^2 for other suburbs). 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.
muhfuhkuh 15y ago
I thought because of various fallacious reasons, gigE was highly improbable in the US. At least, that the was the reason given when S. Korea, Japan, and major cities in China were blessed with it. 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?
- gchucky 15y ago
  I had always heard that here in NYC, it was regulation and monopolization by the larger telcos (mainly TWC) that stopped us from getting higher speeds. The slow rollout for FiOS has reportedly been due to a problem with having to dig up streets and all that..
- ars 15y ago
  > even in NYC, one of the densest population on Earth 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_population_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+population+density http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+population+den...
  - wtallis 15y ago
    If you restrict it to just Manhattan, then it's almost in the top 10. And if you account for wealth, there's no comparison: all else equal, Manhattan should be the most lucrative market on earth for fast internet service.
    - ars 15y ago
      No, just Manhattan is 46th in the list, and if restrict metropolitan areas to the densest parts, I bet that list would change dramatically pushing Manhattan further down. 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.
marshallp 15y ago
Areas with high speed internet might see their house prices go up. If this happens, it might become profitable for homeowners to band together to finance high speed internet installation. Of course, they will need internet based coordination for this to happen efficiently. There might an opportunity for startups in that space.
- veidr 15y ago
  In the US, they will likely also have to battle expensive lawsuits from the (sleazy) corporate incumbent oligopolists (and the influence of their lobbyists). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of-muni-broadband-eternal-war-with-time-warner-cable.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of... It has been done some places, however...
  - marshallp 15y ago
    There might be an opportunity for a startup in the too ... we-hate-telecoms.com
- danielharan 15y ago
  It's also a huge opportunity for commercial property managers. Wiring a building is a good way to attract tech companies that can afford higher rent.
lukev 15y ago
At this point in history, would most users even be able to benefit from gigabit connection speeds? 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.
- djtriptych 15y ago
  At this point in history, would users even be able to benefit from 28.8kbps connection speeds? 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.
  - lukev 15y ago
    Of course we can and will use more. 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.
    - bryanlarsen 15y ago
      But that's a chicken and egg problem. Upgrading ISP to home link creates incentives for others in the chain to upgrade their link.
    - veidr 15y ago
GigabyteCoin 15y ago
Currently living in the same setup in Toronto (same price point for 100mbps unlimted), although it's not available to new subscribers anymore unfortunately. They upped the price $5 and added a 300GB cap. That's with Telus in downtown Toronto. It's been available for the last 8 or so years I believe. Since 2004. 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 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.
- jarek 15y ago
  Is that the Telus downtown condo setup? I saw ads for it as recently as a couple of months ago, is it really no longer available? Also... 5 megabit upload hurts when you have 100 megabit down.
  - GigabyteCoin 15y ago
    Well... the 100mbps is still available, sure. (It's available in all "Cityplace Concorde" buildings as far as I know, which are all just west of the skydome on bremner/fort york) 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.html 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
vgoel 15y ago
Don't get tempted by this. I live in Palo Alto and allowed myself to be enticed by the Sonic.net's advertised promise of "... Broadband at up to 20Mbps ...". I actually got 1.5 Mbps download speed. I would not have been tempted had they been advertising "Broadband speeds 1.5 Mbps - 20 Mbps. You may get lucky and be on the high end or you may not."
- nrp 15y ago
  That is DSL, where they are limited by the length and quality of the pieces of copper connecting the CO or RT to your modem. Their 100mbit and gigabit services are fiber to the home.
- redcircle 15y ago
  I live in the same area and get decent performance with sonic. Things feel fast. Until recently, I had Verizon FIOS, and Sonic doesn't feel all that much slower (or maybe I've become accustomed to the drop in speed). I love how the DSL just works; I have a DSL bridge, connected to an Airport Extreme, which doesn't need to fragment packets because Sonic gives you the full frame size (another reason I like Sonic). Note that you can find performance boosts just by improving the phone wiring in your home;I played with mine until I found a sweet spot.
- mbreese 15y ago
  The problem with Sonic's DSL is that they are still dependent upon AT&T for the copper lines. I've been fighting with them for 3 weeks to get a stable DSL connection (I have their bonded service). After a tech visit everything starting working better (I think it was a config issue on the router). 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).
jedberg 15y ago
I love Sonic. I wish I could get them at my house in Cupertino (hint hint). I would drop UVerse without hesitation. 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.
shrike 15y ago
I recently moved to Seattle where CondoInternet offers unmetered 1Gbps symmetric Internet access for $200/month or 100Mb for $60. Having access that fast changes the way you think about using the Internet; I'm able to host TOR bridge nodes, mirror OSS projects, move VMs around, etc. 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.
kev009 15y ago
I've only bought up to one gigabit at the transit level, and it bottoms out at about $1/mbit currently at that commit. 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.
- mbreese 15y ago
  I know Sonic is publicly against limits and throttling [1]. Their DSL connections don't have any sort of caps. Now, with Fiber the scale may be different, but I don't see their position changing. Their CEO also said that bandwidth wasn't their biggest cost. (but I can't find the link...) [1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/02/web-hogs/ http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/02/web-hogs/
  - kev009 15y ago
    Ideally it would be something like, "we have 100gbit of combined IP transit purchased and peering with google, he.net, and herpderp" and TCP/IP would do it's thing. 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.
    - shimon_e 15y ago
      OVH in Europe has 1tbps in combined IP peering/transit. They are renting servers with 10gbps ports for about $200. Just yesterday they added 80gbps to Paris. http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=41454&postcount=33 http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=41454&postcount=33 Hope Sonic builds a powerful network.
openbear 15y ago
The price is actually ≈ $70 per month. From the article ... 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).
zanny 15y ago
Nobody seems to be asking, but I will - why isn't network cable grouped under the same class of utilities provided by local governments that include roads, sewers, and in some countries, electricity? 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.
Tossrock 15y ago
I think the authors of this article may not realize that a gigabit is equivalent to 125 megabytes. The caption saying that it's "actually much faster" than the 134 Mbps listed by speedtest is silly.
- veidr 15y ago
  No, the test results are in megabits per second, not megabytes, so the author got it right. 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.
  - deleted 15y ago
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easp 15y ago
Grrrrr. I wish someone would give Comcast some competition in Seattle's neighborhoods of single family homes, because CenturyLink, the telco, doesn't seem up to it.
nazgulnarsil 15y ago
It's really depressing that small regulatory changes are playing such big roles in whether a business is a runaway success or a bankruptcy spiral. That barriers to entry have sharply gone up in several key industries should be the huge story for the US economy.
mike-cardwell 15y ago
I have access to about 20Gbit at work (University). At home, I think I have about 8Mbit or something. I don't notice the difference. 8Mbit is (currently) more than fast enough for the vast majority of people using the vast majority of services on the Internet. I doubt I'd even notice if my home connection dropped to 2Mbit.
- zxoq 15y ago
  I have a 1 gbit connection at home and there is little difference to the 100 mbit connection I have at my parents. The gains are pretty much the same as the difference having wifi and gigabit LAN. Transferring large files etc. are in the minute range rather than tens of minutes or even hours. 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.
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    Well, I guess I must not be using the Internet, "effectively," then, whatever that means.
hackermom 15y ago
This is American news. Speeds like these, for this and smaller price tags, are not the least unheard of in Europe or Asia. I'm glad to see that some American ISPs dare to move things forward.
napierzaza 15y ago
In Canada it costs 50$/month for 5Mbit DSL. So I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs...
bwarp 15y ago
At the risk of sounding like a whinging old man, but do we really need 1Gbit to the home at the moment? 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...
- jarito 15y ago
  An interesting argument and a straw-man argument. Let's deal with the straw man first. Just because you have no use for the extra speed doesn't mean others do not. In addition, systems / uses for the speed will only be built when the number of people with access to it is growing. Therefore, there will be early adopters where the speed will gain them little initiallly, but over time we will develop more services that need it. 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.
ajays 15y ago
This is all the more reason why we need a municipal fiber network in major cities (dense urban areas). Don't get me wrong: I love what Sonic is doing, and plan to move to them as my ISP very soon. But the fact that it's so hard for Sonic to build out the fiber infrastructure shows that this is where a government run infrastructure makes sense; after all, isn't the government supposed to take on the massive infrastructure projects? 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.

275 points by Nogwater 15y ago

Back when I lived in the North Bay (2001ish) I switched from SBC to Sonic.net for my DSL service. After setting up the new connection I got a call Dane Jasper asking if everything was satisfactory. Needless to say, I was completely blown away by this. 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)

mbreese 15y ago
For clarification, Dane Jasper is the CEO of Sonic. He still regularly answers posts on their forums too.

veidr 15y ago

I'm from Sebastopol; sonic.net is a truly great ISP. I've cited them as an example of great customer service in general, not just within the (typically awful) ISP industry. 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).

3pt14159 15y ago
This is like TekSavvy in Toronto, at least in my experience. I call, less than one ring, "Billing press 1, Support press 2" 2 "Hello, TekSavvy Technical support" Hi, I can ping 4.2.2.2 but it seems I'm getting 96% packet loss and the web is completely unusable. "Mac, Linux or Windows" Linux. "Awesome. Can you check the dhcp settings" Sure, I just forget the command "dhclient" Awesome [...] Find out it is a problem with the cable box for the building in under 2 mins. If I were with rogers they probably would have had to send someone to my house to get this type of response.
- bryanlarsen 15y ago
  Correction, that's how Teksavvy used to be. However recently they've gotten too big to be able to offer that level of support. A few months ago hold times were up to 1-2 hours because they couldn't hire quick enough. They've since hired enough staff that the hold times are down but obviously it takes a while for staff to train up to that level. 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.
mwsherman 15y ago
The argument for forced sharing of the last mile isn’t that it’s a natural monopoly – that’s unempirical but commonly claimed. (Prior to FedEx and UPS, smart people thought package delivery was a natural monopoly.) 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.
- oconnore 15y ago
  Suburbia in general is only possible with supportive regulation. There is a reason Sonic's business model has only developed in very dense neighborhoods (4000 person/mi^2 vs <1000p/mi^2 for other suburbs). 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.

muhfuhkuh 15y ago

I thought because of various fallacious reasons, gigE was highly improbable in the US. At least, that the was the reason given when S. Korea, Japan, and major cities in China were blessed with it. 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?

gchucky 15y ago
I had always heard that here in NYC, it was regulation and monopolization by the larger telcos (mainly TWC) that stopped us from getting higher speeds. The slow rollout for FiOS has reportedly been due to a problem with having to dig up streets and all that..
ars 15y ago
> even in NYC, one of the densest population on Earth 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_population_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+population+density http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=new+york+population+den...
- wtallis 15y ago
  If you restrict it to just Manhattan, then it's almost in the top 10. And if you account for wealth, there's no comparison: all else equal, Manhattan should be the most lucrative market on earth for fast internet service.
  - ars 15y ago
    No, just Manhattan is 46th in the list, and if restrict metropolitan areas to the densest parts, I bet that list would change dramatically pushing Manhattan further down. 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.

marshallp 15y ago

Areas with high speed internet might see their house prices go up. If this happens, it might become profitable for homeowners to band together to finance high speed internet installation. Of course, they will need internet based coordination for this to happen efficiently. There might an opportunity for startups in that space.

veidr 15y ago
In the US, they will likely also have to battle expensive lawsuits from the (sleazy) corporate incumbent oligopolists (and the influence of their lobbyists). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of-muni-broadband-eternal-war-with-time-warner-cable.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/the-price-of... It has been done some places, however...
- marshallp 15y ago
  There might be an opportunity for a startup in the too ... we-hate-telecoms.com
danielharan 15y ago
It's also a huge opportunity for commercial property managers. Wiring a building is a good way to attract tech companies that can afford higher rent.

lukev 15y ago

At this point in history, would most users even be able to benefit from gigabit connection speeds? 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.

djtriptych 15y ago
At this point in history, would users even be able to benefit from 28.8kbps connection speeds? 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.
- lukev 15y ago
  Of course we can and will use more. 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.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    But that's a chicken and egg problem. Upgrading ISP to home link creates incentives for others in the chain to upgrade their link.
  - veidr 15y ago

GigabyteCoin 15y ago

Currently living in the same setup in Toronto (same price point for 100mbps unlimted), although it's not available to new subscribers anymore unfortunately. They upped the price $5 and added a 300GB cap. That's with Telus in downtown Toronto. It's been available for the last 8 or so years I believe. Since 2004. 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 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.

jarek 15y ago
Is that the Telus downtown condo setup? I saw ads for it as recently as a couple of months ago, is it really no longer available? Also... 5 megabit upload hurts when you have 100 megabit down.
- GigabyteCoin 15y ago
  Well... the 100mbps is still available, sure. (It's available in all "Cityplace Concorde" buildings as far as I know, which are all just west of the skydome on bremner/fort york) 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.html 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

vgoel 15y ago

Don't get tempted by this. I live in Palo Alto and allowed myself to be enticed by the Sonic.net's advertised promise of "... Broadband at up to 20Mbps ...". I actually got 1.5 Mbps download speed. I would not have been tempted had they been advertising "Broadband speeds 1.5 Mbps - 20 Mbps. You may get lucky and be on the high end or you may not."

nrp 15y ago
That is DSL, where they are limited by the length and quality of the pieces of copper connecting the CO or RT to your modem. Their 100mbit and gigabit services are fiber to the home.
redcircle 15y ago
I live in the same area and get decent performance with sonic. Things feel fast. Until recently, I had Verizon FIOS, and Sonic doesn't feel all that much slower (or maybe I've become accustomed to the drop in speed). I love how the DSL just works; I have a DSL bridge, connected to an Airport Extreme, which doesn't need to fragment packets because Sonic gives you the full frame size (another reason I like Sonic). Note that you can find performance boosts just by improving the phone wiring in your home;I played with mine until I found a sweet spot.
mbreese 15y ago
The problem with Sonic's DSL is that they are still dependent upon AT&T for the copper lines. I've been fighting with them for 3 weeks to get a stable DSL connection (I have their bonded service). After a tech visit everything starting working better (I think it was a config issue on the router). 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).

jedberg 15y ago

I love Sonic. I wish I could get them at my house in Cupertino (hint hint). I would drop UVerse without hesitation. 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.

shrike 15y ago

I recently moved to Seattle where CondoInternet offers unmetered 1Gbps symmetric Internet access for $200/month or 100Mb for $60. Having access that fast changes the way you think about using the Internet; I'm able to host TOR bridge nodes, mirror OSS projects, move VMs around, etc. 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.

kev009 15y ago

I've only bought up to one gigabit at the transit level, and it bottoms out at about $1/mbit currently at that commit. 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.

mbreese 15y ago
I know Sonic is publicly against limits and throttling [1]. Their DSL connections don't have any sort of caps. Now, with Fiber the scale may be different, but I don't see their position changing. Their CEO also said that bandwidth wasn't their biggest cost. (but I can't find the link...) [1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/02/web-hogs/ http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/02/web-hogs/
- kev009 15y ago
  Ideally it would be something like, "we have 100gbit of combined IP transit purchased and peering with google, he.net, and herpderp" and TCP/IP would do it's thing. 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.
  - shimon_e 15y ago
    OVH in Europe has 1tbps in combined IP peering/transit. They are renting servers with 10gbps ports for about $200. Just yesterday they added 80gbps to Paris. http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=41454&postcount=33 http://forum.ovh.co.uk/showpost.php?p=41454&postcount=33 Hope Sonic builds a powerful network.

openbear 15y ago

The price is actually ≈ $70 per month. From the article ... 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).

zanny 15y ago

Nobody seems to be asking, but I will - why isn't network cable grouped under the same class of utilities provided by local governments that include roads, sewers, and in some countries, electricity? 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.

Tossrock 15y ago

I think the authors of this article may not realize that a gigabit is equivalent to 125 megabytes. The caption saying that it's "actually much faster" than the 134 Mbps listed by speedtest is silly.

veidr 15y ago
No, the test results are in megabits per second, not megabytes, so the author got it right. 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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

easp 15y ago

Grrrrr. I wish someone would give Comcast some competition in Seattle's neighborhoods of single family homes, because CenturyLink, the telco, doesn't seem up to it.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago

It's really depressing that small regulatory changes are playing such big roles in whether a business is a runaway success or a bankruptcy spiral. That barriers to entry have sharply gone up in several key industries should be the huge story for the US economy.

mike-cardwell 15y ago

I have access to about 20Gbit at work (University). At home, I think I have about 8Mbit or something. I don't notice the difference. 8Mbit is (currently) more than fast enough for the vast majority of people using the vast majority of services on the Internet. I doubt I'd even notice if my home connection dropped to 2Mbit.

zxoq 15y ago
I have a 1 gbit connection at home and there is little difference to the 100 mbit connection I have at my parents. The gains are pretty much the same as the difference having wifi and gigabit LAN. Transferring large files etc. are in the minute range rather than tens of minutes or even hours. 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.
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  Well, I guess I must not be using the Internet, "effectively," then, whatever that means.

hackermom 15y ago

This is American news. Speeds like these, for this and smaller price tags, are not the least unheard of in Europe or Asia. I'm glad to see that some American ISPs dare to move things forward.

napierzaza 15y ago

In Canada it costs 50$/month for 5Mbit DSL. So I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs...

bwarp 15y ago

At the risk of sounding like a whinging old man, but do we really need 1Gbit to the home at the moment? 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...

jarito 15y ago
An interesting argument and a straw-man argument. Let's deal with the straw man first. Just because you have no use for the extra speed doesn't mean others do not. In addition, systems / uses for the speed will only be built when the number of people with access to it is growing. Therefore, there will be early adopters where the speed will gain them little initiallly, but over time we will develop more services that need it. 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.

ajays 15y ago

This is all the more reason why we need a municipal fiber network in major cities (dense urban areas). Don't get me wrong: I love what Sonic is doing, and plan to move to them as my ISP very soon. But the fact that it's so hard for Sonic to build out the fiber infrastructure shows that this is where a government run infrastructure makes sense; after all, isn't the government supposed to take on the massive infrastructure projects? 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.