Fiber in San Leandro

[cifram]

I'm a current Sonic customer with gigabit fiber, in north Oakland, and I love it! Easily the best Internet I've ever had.

Sadly, I may be moving soon, to a new place in San Leandro, near the intersection of Haas Ave and Woodland Ave, and all Sonic can offer there is 50 Mbps DSL. Given the number of people that would be in that house, that would be entirely insufficient bandwidth, so we'd be forced to go with Comcast. Which is a prospect none of us are happy about.

So my question is, what would it take to convince Sonic to run fiber to that neighborhood?

It's a nice residential neighborhood, and I'm guessing many of the residents would be very happy to have better high speed Internet available.

[syntaxsid1]

Hello,

We are actively installing our Fiber infrastructure as fast as we can but due to the Pandemic this process has slowed somewhat. Eventually we want ALL of our customers to be on our Fiber product because there is less overhead than the 50Mbps line share with AT&T at that location now. We are not able to provide a time frame for when we build out in that area since there are many factors that impact the progress of this ie, unsafe telephone poles, delays in permitting office for certain locations awaiting approval etc. Once we are in that area, we will absolutely email you to let you know we have Fiber available for you at that location but we just can't give an ETA at the moment. I hope you find this information useful. Have a good day.


Kind Regards,

[cifram]

Thank you for the prompt reply. I was rather hoping for something a bit more actionable. Like, if there are obstacles to the fiber installation, is there anything we could do, as residents, to help clear them? Or could showing that there are a substantial number of interested customers in the area help prioritize your efforts?

[jacob.karinen]

We do examine % of the neighborhood currently signed up with Sonic as a way to determine where we should expand but there are other determining factors such as if the neighborhood has aerial infrastructure and, as Jeff said, the quality of the poles in the area. When we do run into a pole that is determined to be unsafe we submit a request for additional supports to be added or for the replacement of the pole. This doesn't always mean we'll deploy fiber immediately afterwards but means it will allow us to deploy fiber. In areas where there is underground infrastructure it's a bit harder to deploy due to the cost and red tape that comes with microtrenching. We're working on better ways to deploy our fiber and as time has gone on we've gotten a lot better with our buildouts. While we cannot offer a timeline for your specific address in San Leandro we will announce when fiber build starts in the area.

[oddhack]

We do examine % of the neighborhood currently signed up with Sonic as a way to determine where we should expand ...

I suggest that other considerations be given. For example, my neighborhood in Hayward has a choice of Comcast and... Comcast. There is no AT&T infrastructure aside from legacy DSL AFAICT. No mesh networking wifi providers. No nothing. I expect approximately 0% of the neighborhood are Sonic customers but it's not because they *wouldn't* be, given a choice.