I'm in Berkeley, in an area that "recently" had all its utilities undergrounded. How will Sonic bring Gigabit Fiber to us??? I'd love to swap my Comcast service for Sonic; any chance of it ever being available?
The short answer is: not yet. Today we are focused on bringing fiber to as many of our members as possible, and aerial regions are faster/easier and lower-cost to build, so those areas with aerial utilities are getting it first.greglutz wrote:I'm in Berkeley, in an area that "recently" had all its utilities undergrounded. How will Sonic bring Gigabit Fiber to us??? I'd love to swap my Comcast service for Sonic; any chance of it ever being available?
But the goal is to reach everyone, and we're engaged in advocacy and R&D toward that end. For example, we've encouraged Cities to adopt dig-once policies, which have led to the City of Brentwood seeing over 11,000 homes connected to Sonic fiber. And we continue to advocate for policies for slot-cut installation methods such as micro and nano-trenching. Finally, we're scaling up our organization's capabilities in horizontal directional drilling, which today we use to reach commercial "anchor tenant" users in many communities. Together, I'm optimistic that all of these components will lead to a good outcome for those served by underground utilities today. But it won't happen overnight, this is a long road and there are a lot of components that must align.
I'll note the most critical one: uptake. Membership adoption and monthly subscription revenue drives everything, and today we build where two key things align: Sonic membership, and construction cost. As uptake continues to rise, more and more regions become feasible for us. Put simply, if it costs $1,000 to reach a home aerially, and $2,000 underground, if you've got twice as much demand and membership, the latter becomes feasible.
So, we're all in this together. Sonic's mission for over twenty-four years has been to build better internet access solutions for you. And we've done a great job at that, providing reliable high-performance services backed by good policies (privacy, neutrality), and fair prices. With strong and growing membership, we really can fix the internet in America, expanding new fiber infrastructure to more and more locations, in the Bay Area and eventually beyond.
I'm proud of the progress to date: over 1/3rd of Sonic members are now fiber connected, and the expansion we announced today will greatly increase our reach.
I know the above is a grand vision, and you've got a localized and specific problem, but that's how we get there. Please spread the word.
