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
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