Mill Station Fiber Buildout and Residential Fiber Service?

[DietLowInFiber]

Hey all,

About a week or so ago, I was excited (Like a kid on Christmas morning) to see actual Sonic trucks with huge spools of fiber cable along Mill Station in Sebastopol. I live nearby the node at the corner of Ragle and Mill Station, and was immediately salivating for pure Sonic fiber service. I have the option to use the Re-packaged U-Verse that Sonic offers, but have been avoiding using it as I would rather not use AT&T's IP Addressable space and hardware, etc., and I don't want to increase latency by using Sonic's VPN.

I thought that because Sonic was installing next to that aforementioned node, that I would be able to tap into Sonic's fiber service at the node, with the rest pushed through copper, which I feel might be FAR superior to the Fusion DSL service we're using now (Which we shouldn't even technically have anymore if you check availability).

I was, however, just informed that Sonic fiber is to the home only, and that we wouldn't be able to take advantage of the Sonic fiber being so gosh-dang close.

So my question is, is there any reason Sonic wouldn't allow residential connections to nodes lit up by Sonic's fiber lines? Does Sonic even light up those nodes? It's just frustrating to see Sonic Fiber so close, and not have the option to tap into it, and to be left with no desirable ways to upgrade our 3.5mbps speeds outside of Cable via Comcast, or using re-packaged U-Verse service...

[dane]

This is something we've considered and studied for many years in an attempt to find an opportunity. Unfortunately it's not viable to connect Sonic fiber to the old neighborhood copper distribution cabinets in order to do faster, closer DSL service.

It boils down to economics, the the net result is that an investment in bringing fiber all the way to the premise works out better in the long run. There are a few components:

First, the cost of putting a powered cabinet with battery backup at the "serving area interconnect", where the neighborhood copper is within about 3,000ft of the home. Deploying a cabinet there means a pad, PG&E power, permits, and interconnection with the old copper. Cost is tens of thousands of dollars.

Second, the cost of getting a loop from there to the home connected. By regulation in CA, this is about $165 in one-time cost each time it's done. The reason for this is that AT&T must dispatch a technician out to the neighborhood to make the connection, unlike inside the central office where cross-connects can be quickly and more cost-effectively completed by staff.

Then finally, the result is service that would be be roughly equal in performance to the AT&T FTTN service, which uses the same methods and technology to deliver VDSL2 from the nearby node. We don't see the point in showing up late to the party with a me-too product.

As a result, our focus is on full-fiber last-mile, building gigabit symmetric future-proof service to every premise we can.