Sonic in student rental house

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
4 posts Page 1 of 1
by tschneck » Fri Jun 17, 2022 9:36 am
I have a rental house for college students and see that Sonic service at up to 75 Mbps service is available on ATT fiber to node service as Fusion IPBB-C service that includes one land line. If I provide this Sonic service at my expense to the tenants I have the following questions:
Do I provide the router/modem? Can I block toll charges on the land line, such as to porn phone numbers? If the service goes down, do the tenants call Sonic or call me and my IT helper? Do you recommend that I provide Sonic service or allow the tenants to select their own ISP because the tenants might want faster service than up to 75 Mbps?
by brandonc » Fri Jun 17, 2022 10:14 am
Hello,

You could set-up the service for the tenants, so long as they all have legitimate individual addresses such as apartment/unit numbers. Houses that are converted into small apartment units, may not be able to order service since it only has a singular address.

However, if you do sign up multiple units for service, then you'll be the only authorized contact on the accounts. This means you'd be the only person that would be authorized to make changes to the accounts. This seems like what you were looking for, but one downside that people doing this run into is when the tenants call in for something simple like changing their WiFi password, will not be able to since they aren't on the account. This leads to a lot of simple calls being passed over to the landlord/property manager for approval, which can be a real pain in the neck for everyone involved.

For dispatches, tenants would be able to schedule their own if the service needed repairs as long as you are renting our modem/router, which waives all dispatch fees, so they're would be no charges.

Toll charge calls are automatically blocked by our network, so there's no worries from charges there. The only extra fees there are for our phone service is via International calling to countries/areas not covered by our free international calling. However, international calling must first be enabled by you, it is left disabled by default to avoid unwanted charges.

In my opinion, I would say it would be best to allow the tenants to choose their own ISP/service. It would just cut out a lot of middleman problems and be much more convenient for yourself and the tenants. However, the choice is definitely up to you and how you'd like to handle this for your building.

If you have any other questions, please let me know!

Kind regards,
Brandon C.
Community and Escalations
Sonic
by ngufra » Fri Jun 17, 2022 10:55 am
I think the use case here is a house with individual room for each student and communal kitchen bathroom lounge etc.
And students staying for a year and moving away at different dates.
If a student is only staying a year, they may not want to have service installed for each room and have to return the equipment at the end of the year.
The practical way would be for landlord to order service and pay for it and include it in the rent (without itemizing it) but being able to deduct it as an expense for tax purposes. Similar to water, waste management, electricity.

Would Sonic/AT&T allow that?

Students probably have unlimited data plans that are faster than that anyway.
As to the land line it's useful especially in case of emergency. If living close to a freeway, 911 on a cell phone may connect you to the CPH which may not be what you need.
by brandonc » Tue Jun 21, 2022 3:27 pm
ngufra wrote:I think the use case here is a house with individual room for each student and communal kitchen bathroom lounge etc.
And students staying for a year and moving away at different dates.
If a student is only staying a year, they may not want to have service installed for each room and have to return the equipment at the end of the year.
The practical way would be for landlord to order service and pay for it and include it in the rent (without itemizing it) but being able to deduct it as an expense for tax purposes. Similar to water, waste management, electricity.

Would Sonic/AT&T allow that?
We could provide a single connection to the home in that scenario, that could be shared among the tenants living there and under the landlord's name/billing info. The issue would be if the tenants wanted their own individual connections, then we wouldn't be able to provide that since our system/AT&T's system wouldn't recognize the separate "room numbers" as legitimate addresses to provide service to. However, if they're fine with all sharing the internet connection/bandwidth, then there's no issues there. It'd be the same as roommates all chipping in to cover the bills.

Kind regards,
Brandon C.
Community and Escalations
Sonic
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