Sigh, why is Sonic doing stupid things?

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
8 posts Page 1 of 1
by pboggini » Fri Dec 31, 2021 9:55 pm
I was super excited to see that ATT has Fiber to my home and even more excited that Sonic now has, for the same price and I'm paying for 80 down and 8 up, gig to my home! Great.

So, I placed the order. Surprisingly enough, ATT was ready to do the install in just over a week. When I asked Sonic what router I'd get and if I could keep the old BGW210 since I have a nice UPS setup (DC with barrel connector) I was told they have no idea what router I'd get but I'd need to get a new router. Oh, and I'd also need a new ATA. Wait, what? I have an ATA and it works just fine. Why can't I just keep it? Most of the nice folks I talked to mumbled things about how hard it is to make any sort of exception so I gave up pushing.

When Chris from ATT arrived, he couldn't be nicer. He told me that Sonic "requires their customers to get BGW320's" so there was no way he could let me keep the 210 hooked up and get a separate ONT (which would have allowed me to continue using my DC UPS). OK, I thought, I'm probably better off as the 320 is newer and it has WiFi 6 so I might as well suck it up and figure out a new UPS solution. Insert idea that Sonic really should be helping folks with good UPS recommendations not the typical vagueness that I see posted on these forums.

The cutover to gig was super simple and almost hitless mostly because I could 1) have the old 210 hooked up to the copper and the 320 to fiber and 2) I have 2 switches that do the WiFi in my house so once I reconfigured the DHCP scope to be 192.168.42 instead of 192.168.1 all I had to do was move some RJ45 jacks and things worked great.

The phone, it wasn't so smooth. The new ATA didn't work, the phone light never came on. I hooked up the old one, hey, it works. Call and talk to a nice person in support who tried to explain the insanity that is Sonic's idea of an upgrade. Turns out, a new circuit is ordered and so with that, an new ATA is a must so that it can have a different MAC, sigh. When we troubleshot the ATA and confirmed it was dead I said "hey, how about when you order the replacement ATA you just tell the tools that the MAC address is the MAC address of the old ATA I have sitting right here that works". He mumbled something about how that would be nice but the tools and some ATT requirements make this all way too hard. Sigh, OK, I'll deal in the hopes that I get the new ATA, it works and my old ATA continues to be connected to my number until the new ATA arrives. Guess what, no dice. Tonight my home phone stopped working, well it works fine but it's number is now area code 669 where my home phone is area code 408. Grumble.

I think, wait, maybe, just maybe, if I power up the new ATA it might work? Nope. What if I call my number, ug, busy signal. Geeze. So even with the Sonic Connect app I can't get phone calls. Sure this is the age of cell phones and many of you gripe about having to pay for an analog phone but some of us actually still use ours and it's annoying beyond believe to see something like this that really could have been avoided taken care of.

So, for a company that really, really used to exemplify how an ISP should be run I see a lot of stupid rules put in place that handcuff the smart folks you have working there.

I supposed it's acceptable for Sonic to have their customers be w/o a phone for 3 days but I'm not at all happy about it. This sucks. Someone should just use vi to edit the damn file or files that need editing and put my old MAC in there and then my number will once again work. Please for any Sonic employees who know how the tangled web of crappy tools you have work see if you can help me.

Thanks and Happy New Year.

peterb
by oddhack » Sun Jan 02, 2022 12:29 am
While not responsive to your immediate issue, I'll just say that I got an Obi 200 ATA back in ... 2013, I think? - and configured it for Google Voice. It has worked flawlessly through 3 ISPs and 4 moves since then without my touching the configuration. ISP-provided VOIP feels like a terrible plan by comparison (yes, yes, 911).
by pboggini » Sun Jan 02, 2022 4:21 pm
Yea I really thought about going to ATT Fiber directly and doing something like Obihai or Ooma I consciously decided to stay with Sonic for a couple of reasons. 1) It should have been easier and 2) I'm not overly fond of the likes of ATT or Comcast or any of them. At least with something like Ooma I could get 911 support and the cost is pretty similar.

An update. I've complained here and in email directly to support (cc'd Dane to which I got no reply, not surprising) and this morning a Donald replied saying that they could forward my number to the new temporary number so at least my phone would ring if someone called. I called back around lunch and got Donald which was cool. As usual, he was great to deal with and I could tell he really wanted to help out as much as possible. He went and escalated a couple of times the rule about not being able to just swap my old ATA MAC back in. The first time the supervisor actually told him "it will take too much man power, it's not worth it". I replied, "yea, that's Sonic management essentially giving me the middle finger isn't it?" To his credit, he persisted and did get someone to agree to do that. For some strange reason they connect the ATA to the circuit and not the account which seems odd. Both the circuit and the ATA, and the router and anything else for that matter, should be tied to the account. Anyway, it will take 2 different teams working together to do this and then, at the same time, he's going to have to be around to remove the forward.

So a somewhat happen ending but I still want to talk to the folks who make these decisions. Dane describes Sonic on Yelp as follows:

"Call us rebels, but we think every home and business in America should have fast, affordable access
to the internet. No tyranny, no barriers. Internet freedom for all! Ambitious? "

Hahaha. My last few experiences show that there are plenty of barriers mostly imposed on the folks who Sonic hires to help us customers and saying things like it's "not worth it" to go the extra mile for a long time customer who is w/o a home phone for the 3 day is tyrannical.

Like I told Donald. I call them and raise these issues because I still like Sonic better than the competition which is an admittedly very low bar but I hold Sonic to a much higher standard. Sonic really needs to always think about what the impact of these processes and tools have on their support staff and customers. Not just when things are going as planned but when things go wrong as they often will. I'm always amazed at these tech companies that put in place complex processes trying to automate things and streamline things never ever thinking about what they will need to do when this slick new process fails.

I preferred the old Sonic. They hired smart people and they let them do the right thing. At least, in my experience, they still have the smart people there, at least the support folks I've spoken to in the last 2 years of working with them. All they need to do is take off the shackles and trust them to take care of their customers.
by medina4470 » Sun Jan 02, 2022 7:36 pm
oddhack wrote:While not responsive to your immediate issue, I'll just say that I got an Obi 200 ATA back in ... 2013, I think? - and configured it for Google Voice. It has worked flawlessly through 3 ISPs and 4 moves since then without my touching the configuration. ISP-provided VOIP feels like a terrible plan by comparison (yes, yes, 911).
Unfortunately, OBi200, OBi202, and OBi212 are now EOL (of course, I just recently bought one :roll:). https://www.obitalk.com/info/products/obi212

Ours is configured manually (not using Google Voice) so that should hopefully be fine for now but am looking into going with Grandstream VoIP cordless phones in the near future.
by oddhack » Sun Jan 02, 2022 9:38 pm
medina4470 wrote:
oddhack wrote:While not responsive to your immediate issue, I'll just say that I got an Obi 200 ATA back in ... 2013, I think? - and configured it for Google Voice. It has worked flawlessly through 3 ISPs and 4 moves since then without my touching the configuration. ISP-provided VOIP feels like a terrible plan by comparison (yes, yes, 911).
Unfortunately, OBi200, OBi202, and OBi212 are now EOL (of course, I just recently bought one :roll:). https://www.obitalk.com/info/products/obi212

Ours is configured manually (not using Google Voice) so that should hopefully be fine for now but am looking into going with Grandstream VoIP cordless phones in the near future.
True, but that's two more years of support and assuming Google doesn't change something on the back end, and they could continue working for years after that. I mostly use Gvoice through the browser these days and mostly for SMS - our conference calls have all moved over to Zoom after years of struggling with problem-laden and expensive voice conference systems, so there's little remaining use for an analog phone, for my use cases.

Amusingly I still have the analog phone Sonic sent me years ago plugged in for the occasional call, though it's now through Gvoice running over Comcast (Sonic - please, please, bring fiber to Hayward!)
by medina4470 » Mon Jan 03, 2022 12:41 am
oddhack wrote:
medina4470 wrote:
oddhack wrote:While not responsive to your immediate issue, I'll just say that I got an Obi 200 ATA back in ... 2013, I think? - and configured it for Google Voice. It has worked flawlessly through 3 ISPs and 4 moves since then without my touching the configuration. ISP-provided VOIP feels like a terrible plan by comparison (yes, yes, 911).
Unfortunately, OBi200, OBi202, and OBi212 are now EOL (of course, I just recently bought one :roll:). https://www.obitalk.com/info/products/obi212

Ours is configured manually (not using Google Voice) so that should hopefully be fine for now but am looking into going with Grandstream VoIP cordless phones in the near future.
True, but that's two more years of support and assuming Google doesn't change something on the back end, and they could continue working for years after that. I mostly use Gvoice through the browser these days and mostly for SMS - our conference calls have all moved over to Zoom after years of struggling with problem-laden and expensive voice conference systems, so there's little remaining use for an analog phone, for my use cases.

Amusingly I still have the analog phone Sonic sent me years ago plugged in for the occasional call, though it's now through Gvoice running over Comcast (Sonic - please, please, bring fiber to Hayward!)
Yeah, I am pretty satisfied with our current VoIP provider because it’s Bring Your Own Device. Our house’s CAT3 wiring is also probably ready for retirement so going with VoIP phones sounds like a good plan. Plus, now that Sonic is starting to offer the new standalone Fiber Internet in our area, we’d probably just keep our current VoIP provider.
by charles2 » Mon Jan 03, 2022 5:48 pm
I gather you signed up for Sonic over AT&T fiber service. If Sonic insists you must have a BGW320 router instead of a BGW210 router, that might well be a mandate - explicit or in effect - originating from AT&T.
by pboggini » Wed Jan 05, 2022 2:32 pm
Following up. Got a call from a very helpful person on Saturday and he escalated not once but twice and was finally able to convince folks that it was important to get the old ATA into the database(s) so that we could return my home phone to working. On Saturday, he forwarded my 408 number to the 669 number associated with the old ATA. Then, on Monday, he got everyong involved that needed to get involved and got the old ATA in as my current and future ATA! On Monday he also got the Mobile Connect config working again!

As I keep saying, Sonic is unique in the quality of folks they have on their support staff and they are second to none!

Now, as some of you might remember, I'm the guy who bought this UPS for the BGW210 I had on my FTTN setup:

https://www.neobits.com/apc_schneider_e ... tlEALw_wcB

Note that it only has a single 12V barrel connector so in order for me to make sure the phone also stayed up was to hook the ATA up to a USB A to USB micro cable plugged into the USB port on the back of the BGW210. This worked 100%. Ironically, it also worked initially on the BGW320 including when my 408 number was forwarded to the 669 number. Once we got everything set up on Monday I would get dial tone and I could call out. When I or anyone else would call in, the phone would ring but when I picked up the phone the ATA would reboot (all three lights would go out and I would just see the power light and then a few minutes after that the other lights would come on and I'd get dial tone again). The tech who's name I'm not using as I'm not sure how appropriate it is even though he was super, was off doing stuff I did some googling and found some reference to some grandstream phones that would reboot when someone tried to pick up the phone on an incoming call and the cause was under voltage. I thought to myself, "wait, maybe I should try the actual power adaptor to see if maybe the USB port on this BGW320 isn't providing enough current." After I did that and got my call back (on my cell) we did more testing and it worked. So, a lot was changed on the back end which could have made a difference but then I also put that charger in there and now it's solid. At some point I might go back to trying it if/when I can find a suitable DC UPS for the new router.

Until then, Sonic did eventually make it right after I made a bunch of noise about it. Throughout, the folks on the other end of the phone were always pleasant, eager to help and wanted to try and do the right thing for me.
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