Sonic.Net Offering 1 Gbps, Unlimited Phone for $40 in California

Hello Linkbait title! 'in California' = one lonely 8000 souls village in the outer North East Bay. Woot.

Note that Sonic does a bit of a con on the "free" phone service. They won't let you forgo the phone service. That results in additional $12 in charges and taxes on your bill, over half of which is a fee that goes entirely to Sonic. In the US phone companies are allowed to charge extra fees to comply with the law, and Sonic charges the maximum allowable. Not even AT&T does that! Of course they are very skilled at making it look like the fee goes to the government, but it doesn't.

I sincerely hope more companies will follow in Google's footsteps with cheap prices for fast internet. As much as I love what Google does with its innovations, the more competition the better.

I had Sonic ADSL until recently, and their customer service was excellent, but I'm just too far from the CO to get reasonable speeds, so I (sadly) switched to Comcast. I hope that some point they will start offering FTTH in my neighborhood (50 miles west of Brentwood), but who knows if local city government will ever allow it.

Excellent. Now, even if they don't deliver to my neighborhood (which is kind of a toss up, as I'm next to a school, but also in a cluster of much older than average housing), my comcast speeds will improve. Thank goodness for some competition, and some shockingly sensible city government.

In Brentwood. Which happens to be a very tiny town in California.

Sonic's a darn good ISP, though. I wish they offered service in my area, I'd take them up in a heartbeat.

Not even $40 1Gbps internet would get me to put up with the traffic required to get to and from Brentwood. Highway 4 is the pits.

What a strange place to launch a service.

Brentwood - Here comes a surge in UCLA applications.

1 Gbps down sounds nice, but what's the upload speed going to be?

Only in Brentwood, California ;)

I fail to see how this model works unless it's being subsidized by some other source. Fiber is not cheap to purchase, deploy or to maintain as a medium, let alone all of the equipment that lights it, routers that will route it, and upstream network to offload the traffic. I see that the city will be leasing them the conduit, which will make deployment significantly cheaper, but didn't see any details on rates. If one person uses 500Mbps (half of their bandwidth) for 37 hours out of the month, and sonic.net has negotiated basement bottom prices for bandwidth alone at say $0.50/Mbps, that is still a $250 cost to them as a provider. Sure there's over-subscription models, but even if a small percentage of their users actually use the bandwidth, they would have to be losing money on this approach unless they traffic shape or cap speeds slower as a "shared" resource. Can someone please explain how the economics of a deal like this could lead to profit for the provider?