check availability speed offerings seems inaccurate

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
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by ken_brashear » Thu Sep 13, 2018 7:06 pm
I suggested to a colleague who lives Sunnyvale, CA to check out Sonic. He went to the Sonic website and clicked on the check availability button. The speed available came at 10Mbps download and he said no thanks. Although I am already a Sonic customer, I checked my availability and it came back 20Mbps download. I thought that was odd considering I have 50Mbps FTTN service. That was last week. I just checked it again and it came back 20Mbps.
by guest » Fri Sep 14, 2018 9:44 am
I agree.
The AT&T site currents shows 50 mbps max for my house. However, the Sonic site lists 20 mbps max.
Up until about a month ago, the Sonic site listed the same as the AT&T site: 50 mbps.
It appears that, whatever Sonic did when it provided the AT&T fiber offering, it either withdrew or broke the AT&T 50mbps FTTN offering.
I don't recall Sonic announcing that it was withdrawing the AT&T 50mbps FTTN offering. So it would appear that the Sonic AT&T 50mbps FTTN offering is simply broken on the Sonic site.
Anyone else showing that discrepancy?
by dane » Fri Sep 14, 2018 10:03 am
We'd need to address in order to look into this.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by guest » Fri Sep 14, 2018 10:52 am
I just checked the following address for purposes of an example:
1118 Olive Branch Lane, San Jose, CA 95120

On the AT&T site, that address shows 10mbps and 50mbps available.
On the Sonic site, that address shows 10mbps and 20mbps available.
The same is true of some other nearby addresses that I tested in the area that are within FTTN range.
That is, at least in those instances, the Sonic site does not show that the FTTN speed is available.
by dane » Fri Sep 14, 2018 3:29 pm
guest wrote:I just checked the following address for purposes of an example:
1118 Olive Branch Lane, San Jose, CA 95120

On the AT&T site, that address shows 10mbps and 50mbps available.
On the Sonic site, that address shows 10mbps and 20mbps available.
The same is true of some other nearby addresses that I tested in the area that are within FTTN range.
That is, at least in those instances, the Sonic site does not show that the FTTN speed is available.
This is a location where Sonic can deliver our own Fusion service, POTS and ADSL2+, over copper. And also, AT&T has their U-Verse there, likely using VDSL2 from a nearby cabinet.

What this exposes is how Sonic selects and presents from the potential available services. At a given location, we might have our own fiber, and also access to AT&T fiber, and also Fusion copper - but of course we'll only show the preferred service, Sonic fiber.

In other spot (as in this example), we might have Fusion from the CO, and also access an AT&T IP Broadband offering. Clearly our Fusion single pair beats theirs, but their cabinet-derived product "beats" ours on performance. And if our product was <10Mbps for the X2 offering, we'd flop over to the AT&T product. But when we can deliver 20Mbps, "on net", we consider that superior to 50Mbps over a resold network.

It's left as an exercise for the reader to determine if more megabits off net are better or not, and it's a rather arbitrary best guess business decision our side about how those break-points are selected.

BTW, you'll also see this in some very slow regions - where we _could_ offer an AT&T IP Broadband product at 3Mbps for example, but we just don't consider that a viable product for a new connection today, so we'll simply show no availability at all.
Dane Jasper
Sonic
by guest » Fri Sep 14, 2018 5:12 pm
Dane,

The various addresses that I picked showed 50mbps available on the Sonic site prior to the time that Sonic offered fiber at other addresses (far away).
That is, Sonic simply removed the FTTN 50mbps service that it was showing for those addresses up to about a month ago.
Unless, at that time, Sonic intentionally changed the algorithm for what the "best" service was to offer at a particular address, the change that introduced the fiber service simply broke the earlier algorithm.
This would not be surprising, inasmuch as Sonic had bugs in showing the availability of the fiber offerings.
You appear to be saying that Sonic did not intentionally change its earlier algorithm. If so, the change apparently is simply a bug.
by guest » Tue Sep 18, 2018 8:31 pm
I had a similar experience. I have AT&T UVerse at 50mbps. A few months back I checked sonic to see if fiber was available (San Ramon) - No luck, but the page came back with up to 50mbps available.

Fast-forward to just now, and it's showing a max of 20mbps for the same location. I'd like to get off of AT&T, but that's quite the bandwidth reduction - below Netflix recommendations for 4k video.
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