Any Experience with Sonic internet over AT&T Fiber?

[wazzuFreddo]

I've been a sonic.net customer for years with their service over AT&T's copper infrastructure.

Does anyone have any experience with the Sonic.net service over AT&T's infrastructure? I'm not lucky enough to live where Sonic has run their own infrastructure.

What will they do in the install, just install a fiber box next to the telephone demarcation or will they run the fiber to where I have my existing phone drop and go through the crawl space? I don't really feel like jumping down there myself. :laughing

 

[wannabe]

I've heard so many good things about Sonic fiber. I did not know that they had a service that ran through AT&T's infrastructure. I just know that I'm getting to the point where now that we are all working from home and are on video conferences all day, we can almost tell who is stuck with AT&T as their home internet provider.

Apparently, DSL still stands for 'does seldom link.' :teeth

Sorry, I have nothing constructive to add to this thread.

 

[cal scott]

Perhaps a little off topic, but I have AT&T UVerse internet and, with the increased usage of a family of 5 all working from home, it has been super glitchy, dropping several times a day. Are others seeing this? Getting ahold of anyone at AT&T to address the issue is a nightmare. I am getting to the point of perhaps switching to something else if I could be confident it would provide a better experience for about the same cost. Interested in hearing others experience with Sonic - not a provide that I had ever heard of.

 

[bpw]

When I got sonic (normal copper) they ran a phone line from the pole all the way into my living room for free once they figured out we didn’t actually have a working phone line and what remained of the old one was a complete mess.

The installer spent a ton of hours at our house climbing around on ladders and up telephone poles.

 

[mikev]

I have their resold U-Verse.

It works as advertised. Speeds are as advertised.

It's AT&T Hardware. My modem has AT&T U-Verse branding. I don't deal with AT&T whatsoever though.

I could pay less and have faster speeds with Comcast, but fuck that company. I'm happy with Sonic.

I wish I could de-couple the phone service that costs me about $10 in taxes per month.

 

[wazzuFreddo]

We actually use the phone so it works for us.

I figure rather than jumping down in the crawl space myself to add copper, I can upgrade and have someone else jump down there to add fiber. :laughing

The boys are only going to eat up more and more bandwidth anyway.

 

[bpw]

I have their resold U-Verse.

It works as advertised. Speeds are as advertised.

It's AT&T Hardware. My modem has AT&T U-Verse branding. I don't deal with AT&T whatsoever though.

I could pay less and have faster speeds with Comcast, but fuck that company. I'm happy with Sonic.

I wish I could de-couple the phone service that costs me about $10 in taxes per month.

I used to have Comcast, their advertised speeds are "optimistic" to say the least. A Comcast 50mbps connection is good for about 15mbps unless you happen to use the internet between 3-5am.

My Sonic is supposedly slower, but I actually end up with better speeds overall.

 

[Abacinator]

I get 250-300 Mbps downstream from Comcast during peak times on a wired connection :thumbup

Upstream tops out around 12 :nchantr

 

[afm199]

We actually use the phone so it works for us.

I figure rather than jumping down in the crawl space myself to add copper, I can upgrade and have someone else jump down there to add fiber. :laughing

The boys are only going to eat up more and more bandwidth anyway.

Depends on location. In Oakland, believe it or not, Sonic uses AT&T's ancient copper, they don't install fiber. They do install fiber to the nearest node, but it may be miles away. I ended up using their plan where I pay for two copper lines. Costs $88 a month total, and the speed is pretty good. 35 to 50 megabits/ps down and 5-7 up.

 

[johnk]

I had Sonic for years in SF (Their older, DSL service) and I loved them. One thing nobody's mentioned is Sonic has great support/tech people. Even calling them on the phone I got great tech support.
We're in a more rural area now so comcast is the only (shitty and expensive) option. Sonic is expanding in our area but I'm not holding my breathe.

 

[afm199]

I had Sonic for years in SF (Their older, DSL service) and I loved them. One thing nobody's mentioned is Sonic has great support/tech people. Even calling them on the phone I got great tech support.
We're in a more rural area now so comcast is the only (shitty and expensive) option. Sonic is expanding in our area but I'm not holding my breathe.

Yup. Even though AT&T provides the copper for the Sonic DSL, you don't have to deal with them, you deal with Sonic techs, who are really high quality.

 

[lgyee4]

I've had both. I switched from ATT to Sonic primarily because of their customer service. Sonic is MUCH better to work with should any issues arise.

 

[wazzuFreddo]

Depends on location. In Oakland, believe it or not, Sonic uses AT&T's ancient copper, they don't install fiber. They do install fiber to the nearest node, but it may be miles away. I ended up using their plan where I pay for two copper lines. Costs $88 a month total, and the speed is pretty good. 35 to 50 megabits/ps down and 5-7 up.

That is what I have right now, but AT&T has since run fiber on the poles out front of my house.

I had Sonic for years in SF (Their older, DSL service) and I loved them. One thing nobody's mentioned is Sonic has great support/tech people. Even calling them on the phone I got great tech support.
We're in a more rural area now so comcast is the only (shitty and expensive) option. Sonic is expanding in our area but I'm not holding my breathe.

Their tech support is great. I was looking for the number and they have a service online where you can enter your number and they call you when your space in the queue pops up. Nice not having to listen to a ton of hold music. Also nice to talk to someone local rather than an overseas call center or someone in a disgruntled part of the country that lives to hate on Californians :laughing

 

[Bowling4Bikes]

The ATT line is super long for my neighborhood. I tried Sonic over ATT but got a max of 12mbps and it failed often. The service wasn't good either. It was a mashup up ATT techs trying to solve Sonic problems etc.

I wanted to like them so bad, but it just didn't work out for me. I hope your experience is better.

 

[asdfghwy]

I've had sonic broadband in sacramento, it was okay for cable internet. Currently running ATT fiber and I've never had a drop in connection and consistently get very close to 1Gbps up/down on fast.com

 

[tzrider]

I get 250-300 Mbps downstream from Comcast during peak times on a wired connection :thumbup

Upstream tops out around 12 :nchantr

I'm getting 270 down, 13.1 up at 2:30 PM today over WiFi.

It's not clear to me that changing providers is a solution to much of anything right now with the increased load on the system. I have two external uptime monitors running against servers on my network and when SIP went into effect, I went from having 2 or 3 30 second outages each week to over 50. The trend absolutely correlated to SIP.

 

[mikev]

Not surprising. Comcast oversells the shit out of their lines.

 

[tzrider]

It sounds consistent with what others are experiencing. I don't think anyone's network was built for this.

 

[mikev]

That's a different story entirely :laughing

There's no reason we shouldn't have nationwide fiber already

 

[AbsolutEnduser]

.. they ran a phone line from the pole all the way into my living room for free once they figured out we didn’t actually have a working phone line and what remained of the old one was a complete mess.

The installer spent a ton of hours at our house climbing around on ladders and up telephone poles.

wow, that's good.. someone scored..:thumbup

..
Also nice to talk to someone local rather than an overseas call center or someone in a disgruntled part of the country that lives to hate on Californians :laughing

Haha, funny.

anyway, support :thumbup