Sonic.net

PG&E has warned of possible outages of up to 5 days. The areas affected could include Santa Rosa. Does Sonic have contingency plans in this event?

Yes, Sonic has power generation capabilities, and As a result we do not anticipate any impact.

Because of the potential for earthquakes, facilities like our must have independent power which doesn’t rely on natural gas, so diesel is used. And for cooling we require water, so we have on-site water storage as well. Because while power outages are pretty common, in an earthquake you could also see a loss of water and natural gas lines too. We are prepared for those possibilities.

dane wrote:Yes, Sonic has power generation capabilities, and As a result we do not anticipate any impact.

Because of the potential for earthquakes, facilities like our must have independent power which doesn’t rely on natural gas, so diesel is used. And for cooling we require water, so we have on-site water storage as well. Because while power outages are pretty common, in an earthquake you could also see a loss of water and natural gas lines too. We are prepared for those possibilities.

Interesting. Do these power generation capabilities cover all points in between a fiber customer's ONT and wherever you do your switching onto a backbone? Don't know if I am asking this question correctly. To put it differently, should a home fiber customer with proper backup power expect internet and phone service to continue if the face of a power outage (as opposed to some physical problem like a line being severed)?

Thanks.

ds_sonic_asif wrote:Interesting. Do these power generation capabilities cover all points in between a fiber customer's ONT and wherever you do your switching onto a backbone? Don't know if I am asking this question correctly. To put it differently, should a home fiber customer with proper backup power expect internet and phone service to continue if the face of a power outage (as opposed to some physical problem like a line being severed)?

Thanks.

Yes, of course. We are a public utility, so we've really got to deliver 24/7/365. So for example for copper-connected customers this means line powered services from the COs, so POTS will continue to function, as will the DSL. For our fiber-connected customers, all active equipment is also backed up. This all of course depends on all of the wide area networking, our data-centers and peering, our DNS and authentication and hosting, etc. All of these items are in facilities with freestanding power generation. And in the limited locations where we do have remote cabinets with equipment in them, we've got power connect points and generators that we dispatch to back those up. All normal stuff in the day to day operations.

The only area I've got some concern is refueling. Normal power outages are not as widespread nor as long, so I'm concerned that diesel itself and the ways to get it delivered may be impaired and that could affect entities like ours that otherwise have normal power generating equipment and contingency plans in place. This would be the first event of this scale, and it's more like the earthquake scenario, and we've thankfully never experienced what that does to the availability of fuel and its transport in a region.

We have ATT fiber-to-the-node with VOIP for our land line. If our power goes out, I expect the phone won’t work? It needs power to work, as when I turn off the powerstrip to reboot the router, the phone doesn’t work.

No worries, we have cell phones and I think, I hope, cell towers continue to work for 24 hours after power is out, from what I have seen on the interweb.

Thanks for the useful replies Dane.
What's the minimum time you are confident the facilities can remain online? Are we talking a few hours, before refueling becomes necessary or are you setup to run backup for a couple of days or more?

Also, do you have a communication plan in place to inform customers?

-- Tim

bibihome wrote:Thanks for the useful replies Dane.
What's the minimum time you are confident the facilities can remain online? Are we talking a few hours, before refueling becomes necessary or are you setup to run backup for a couple of days or more?

Also, do you have a communication plan in place to inform customers?

-- Tim

We are always prepared for indefinite operations without any utilities: power, water or natural gas.

We did post a system message yesterday just acknowledging that there may be regional power outages, but that we expect no impact to our network. Folks were asking the same question you are, basically: do we expect any outages. Nope, unless something unanticipated arises, we do not. https://sonicstatus.com/

We have been without power since 10:30pm and thanks to my UPS unit(s), Sonic Fiber, Eero and VoIP phone are operational with no issues.
Thanks
Claus

We are in Oakmont (480 Hillsdale). We have backup power for our router etc, but there is no connectivity to sonic. Will this part of your network get and backup power soon?

Thanks in advance /noel lyons/

I'm a FTTN customer and have had no internet access or home phone since Wednesday evening. When we called support they couldn't tell us if it was us or ATT (since FTTN is just repackaged uverse). When viewing the ATT website we could only check for general outage info by zip code but would need an actual uverse account with att to determine if my actual house was affected.

I'd like to assume my outage is due to the power shutdown and not some coincidental hardware issue. But support wasn't able to tell me for certain. I opted to wait until power has returned to the city before calling support again but just wanted to let you all know your backup contingencies failed me as a customer.

I came to sonic because of your stance with net neutrality and because there was the potential for gigabit fiber at some point in the future. Unfortunately, since switching, I've experienced a lot of random and unexplainable downtime. I'm sticking with you guys but am a bit frustrated.