Sonic.net

I am a long time Fusion customer and would love to stick with Sonic, but I live in Mountain View and I cannot deal with the slow speeds. The only option for Gigabit speed at my home address is Comcast so I reluctantly ordered it. Even though I unplugged my Sonic router 6 months ago I have been paying for the internet + phone service.

I'd like to reduce to only phone service which I understand is $10 per month. At some point if Sonic ever offers Gigabit here (possibly through AT&T?) I'd switch back in a heartbeat. But when I called support they said that there was a $150 installation charge...to install a phone line that has been on Sonic for at least a decade.

Any reason why I should not port over to Google Voice for free? Frankly, this kind of bogus charge is something I expected from Comcast not Sonic.

I don't remember any $10 voice line. I think it's $50 fusion which is internet and voice PLUS about $10 taxes and fees.
Not sure sonic can/want to unbundle that and sell you just the voice part.

The voice lines on fiber are VOIP.
Maybe sonic could sell you a VOIP line that you would use over comcast but i think they require you use their analog telephone adapter.

We do offer a copper POTS voice-only line, but yes, it requires a new line and has a costly activation fee. Installation is an additional charge, if required. The service has no margin in the monthly fee, so the full costs of the infrastructure are loaded into the non-recurring fees. Yes, a VoIP solution would be lower-cost.

Last August our family moved from a location near the CO where we had X1 service for 10 years at about 11Mbps to a more distant location with X1 speed of 3.5Mbps. This was marginally satisfactory until April, when it became clear we needed higher speed, and an extra $20 a month for X2 at 7Mbps was not going to be a good solution, so reluctantly we went with Comcast. We were informed that, despite paying the full rate of $50 per month plus fees, we were now committed to a full year or face an early termination charge, so we are paying out the year for unused DSL.

Wanting to keep our landline, to avoid the hassle of setting up VOiP, 911 service, and a UPS, we decided to continue our landline POTS. But instead of being willing to simply switch the connection from DSLAM to the POTS at the CO, we are being charged the full freight of $150 for a new line to be added, then we will have to call and port out old phone number to the new line before abandoning the old.

So to ask the OP question again, why did the field tech need to come to my house at all, when we already had the necessary wiring in place?

The tech visit was to install the new Voice only line since the previous lines were both data (internet) and phone. We have attempted to downgrade from a Fusion DSL services to Voice Only in the past but ran into to many problems for that to be a viable option.

At this point we require the $150 installation fee to cover the costs of provisioning the new line and sending out a technician to complete the cross connect. Without the installation fee we would not be able to price the Voice Only line with such a low monthly cost.

Another customer who really doesn't want to bother with VOIP etc.

Can POTS be combined with FTTN?

Thank you!

In most cases POTS cannot be combined with FTTN or IPBB services because they use the internal wiring of the home for internet only. If you were to plug a phone into the homes phone jacks it will not be able to call out or receive calls because the line is not routed to any type of phone based system.

That being said if your home has the internal wiring to allow another phone line to come in you could in theory have a POTS phone with the FTTN/IPBB services. This is not something we can provide assistance with and the POTS line would be a separate service.