Fiber to the home

[nicknick]

I'm guessing that Sonic has been focusing on expanding service with the Fusion product, which has obviously been very successful, and that deployment of Fiber has been put on the back-burner, so to speak. It makes sense to get as many paying customers as possible in each area before investing the money required in the infrastructure for higher speed connections.

Is there any update on when we might expect to see fiber either tested or deployed in Sebastopol or Santa Rosa?

And is there any way to increase our chances of being a test neighborhood? (and no, I'm not going to rename my first-born )

[kgc]

Actually, I hope I'm not stealing anyone's thunder but we've officially broke ground in Sebastopol yesterday and have our own fiber "in the ground." I don't know what else is or is not secret around this project so I'll leave it at that. I expect Dane will have something to say about this shortly!

[nicknick]

Dane posted a link to a picture on twitter so apparently the cat is out of the bag:http://www.flickr.com/photos/danejasper/5793239469/

[dane]

Construction started this last Thursday. Here's a brief slideshow from that work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehkE5adjnUo

We will be doing the aerial work this next week, and I'd guess the first beta homes will come online in a month or two. I'll do a write-up on the blog shortly.

-Dane

[augie]

And here's the PD article:

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20 ... Sebastopol

[jrostkow]

To help gauge interest in fiber sonic.net should do the following:

1. Create webform where people submit their name, address, and email if they would be willing to commit to $40 for 100 Mb or $70 for 1 Gb fiber/phone service if offered in their neighborhood. List would be limited to bay area zip codes.
2. Lay home on submitters that it is their duty to spread the word about sonic fiber in their neighborhood and get others to fill out this form. Although sonic makes no guarantee that fiber will make it to their neighborhood, this information will aid sonic in determining where to research future fiber placement.

The point of the form is to go viral and spread awareness about sonic's noble goal of delivering speedy interest access to the masses. I think it would go viral in a huge way.

[nicknick]

I think sonic.net has built up a very good list with their Fusion and AT&T DSL customers.

Since it is still very early (they are just beginning field testing), I bet it will be quite a while before they start building out a network.

[dane]

To help gauge interest in fiber sonic.net should do the following:

1. Create webform where people submit their name, address, and email if they would be willing to commit to $40 for 100 Mb or $70 for 1 Gb fiber/phone service if offered in their neighborhood. List would be limited to bay area zip codes.

We've got that form, it's here! http://sonic.net/fusion/

By this, I mean that we count every Fusion service (where available) or legacy AT&T DSL (where Fusion is not available) as a "vote" for fiber. As you are likely curious how various regions stack up, here are the top 10 cities, by current market share rank:

• Sebastopol
• Forestville
• Santa Rosa
• Healdsburg
• Cotati
• Sonoma
• Cloverdale
• Petaluma
• Emeryville
• Berkeley

* You'll note that San Francisco is not in this list - though we have more Fusion customers there than anywhere else. San Francisco is actually nine distinct regions in our architecture, and we haven't yet done the demographic study of each region to determine where they rank in this list.

We will choose our second city once we wrap up Sebastopol, so there is likely to be substantial change in this list before a decision is made. We will also be adding additional scoring factors such as city size (Forestville is pretty darn small, Santa Rosa is a rather large project) and costs (Healdsburg is a municipal utility, not PG&E, so right-of-way costs may be higher.) These additional factors will be computed as part of the "score" of each location in order to determine what area is next up.

A key point is that our new "Fusion Fiber" is the same price as Fusion. This was done so that we can seamlessly migrate customers from Fusion copper to Fusion Fiber as fiber rolls out. This lets us build out with confidence, knowing how many customers we can migrate over "day one".

This is the grand idea behind the Fusion product. Ta-da!

-Dane

[dane]

Moderator note: I moved the thread to the Access forum, as that's a better spot for it.

[plwww]

Wow, sounds like you have an awesome plan! I'm in a rural valley area(Sutter County) so won't be seeing this type of service anytime soon, but I am curious of the details; such as, is this some sort of PON or a dedicated fiber to each home? Are the speeds synchronous? Also, I can't imagine how your competitors(AT&T/cable) will move to counter this type of service...those price points absolutely crush what is offered in my area. Heck, that gigabit pricing is below what we're paying out here for DSL+phone(which due to my distance of ~12500 feet from CO, is maxed at ~3mb).

Good luck with the fiber!