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Comment by woolvalley | Hacker News Reader

When I brought up those two ISPs to coworkers, they said they experienced frequent enough outages. Do you use them? What has your experience been like?

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Sonic quality depends on the quality of the AT&T wiring to your home. At my old house in Oakland, Sonic meant 3mbit DSL because AT&T had not updated the old twisted pair. It meant I bailed and signed up for Comcast.

My new place in San Jose has fiber to the premise, so I signed up for Sonic again. Good bandwidth, Rock solid service.

In SF, at least, Sonic has started stringing their own fiber. But it’s not in every neighborhood yet, and even in places where they are installing fiber, some streets may be left dark, (Including, frustratingly, a big swath of Portrero Hill where the utility poles are “overloaded”.)

If you’re in a larger building (15+ units), there are a couple of other fiber providers that may be an option, if building management is up for it.

MonkeyBrains is a wireless ISP. I regularly get 25-40 Mbps from them (though they don’t guarantee that). I’ve had only occasional slowdowns and one outage lasting a few hours. (So, more reliable than Comcast had been, at least for me.) I’d heard rumors MonkeyBrains was planning some equipment upgrades that would let them deliver 60-80 Mbps, but no official announcement or timetable.

I use Monkey Brains. I have very occasionally experienced a momentary drop in connectivity which immediately recovered. These have been less frequent than the times I had to call up Comcast and debug an outage over the phone.

See dslreports for up to date local isp speed and reliability records.

http://www.dslreports.com/

sonic.net (and pair.com, for hosting) are two companies where I have always been delighted on the few occasions when I had to call tech support, due to the intelligence and effectiveness of the people on the other end of the line.

It's just such a pleasure to talk to someone who is actually listening to and thinking about your problem, instead of simply reading from a script.

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