Our home's 10 Gb installation was completed this afternoon. There were a lot of Sonic-branded Ford Transit Connect vans out today. My next door neighbor had an installation appointment an hour before mine, and another neighbor 3 houses down had another but that person drove a larger pickup truck. It looked like it belonged to a "manager." While I was out and about before noon I saw 3 more vans/trucks. Sonic is very busy in my neck of the woods.
EDIT: Two days prior, Sonic came out to install the drop cable. My experiences at viewtopic.php?start=30&t=8313.
The technician was punctual. A pleasant surprise compared with the incumbents. My installation window was between 12-4 and Julio arrived at 12:02 having come all the way from Rohnert Park. He left at 2:22.
Sonic uses a transition/fiber interface device box along with an ONT and gateway. My parents were among the first wave of residents to have Sonic Fiber in San Francisco and they have that topology. My fiber interface device is Sonic branded, however. The ONT has 10 Gb and 1 Gb downstream ports but Sonic says the 1 Gb port is disabled (https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/article ... dTran-622v). I was worried they would migrate to a combo ONT/gateway since that's what they were field testing last year and AT&T has also moved towards this direction. The technician told me Sonic has 1 Gb, and 2.5 Gb gateways but the only gateway that supports 10 Gb is the eero Max 7. This doesn't sound right so I created a ticket to Sonic support to get more details. The eero has two 10 Gb ports and two 2.5 Gb ports. Initial setup requires one to download the eero app. It's a typical phone app and feels wrong to manage something like a residential gateway using a phone but that's the way things are going these days. The eero comes pre-configured with the standard Sonic 192.168.4.1 IP but https is not enabled. I want to put the device in bridge mode and while the app will let you do that, eero's website states once it's in bridge mode, it can't be managed by the app anymore. It will still provide WiFi service in bridge mode.
While I migrate my current 1 Gb firewall to another so my concern was how to reset the eero back to automatic mode (route) while it's in bridge. I sent off another email to Sonic support.
I wanted to have the ONT/transition box on the inner side of my garage, next to my network closet and Julio didn't have any concerns. Not wanting to bother him and have him climb up to the top of my garage and route the cable, I did that. Instead of going through the same space where AT&T's cable went I we used the garage's frieze board. If the ONT/transition box is installed where my AT&T ONT currently resides--the outer side of my garage--we would have required a very long fiber patch cord to go from that spot to my network closet. Of course I could have the gateway there, too; but WiFi would be really bad due to the location. Sonic technicians carry 3m patch cables.
The spot where I wanted the transition box already had drywall opened for another project so it was simple fishing the cable. The cable's casing splits into two pieces, exposing the fiber. The casing that's typically discarded can be used for fishing wires as well. I used it to fish the patch cord, roughly 2 meters down the cavity. The casing's slippery texture really helps with fishing unlike regular copper cables. I saved the casings for future use.
Sonic doesn't use fusion splicers to terminate the SC connector. They use a mechanical splice. https://qlonetworks.com/sc-apc-h02-installation-guide. Fusion splicing is superior to mechanical. While I have seen training materials that say mechanical splicing index-matching gels expire, I was also told by a friend who has a long history of fiber deployment that mechanical splices are considered permanent as long as they are not disturbed--splice removed, exposing gel, and respliced. Here is a picture of my parents' transition box installed over 8 years ago. My parents' fiber never had any issues so my concerns are probably unwarranted.
For some reason I thought Sonic at that time used a fusion splicer but based on the pictures above they did not. If a fusion splicer was used there would be a protective sleeve (bottom of picture of my AT&T ONT).
The installation was relatively painless. Testing was a little more challenging as many who post here can attest.
The technician used a huge 10 Gb dongle to test a high speed connection using his notebook. It was flakey and didn't work. His 1 Gb dongle worked fine. I tried to do it using a lab computer but my speeds were pretty "slow" using a browser. 3.5 Gb download, and around 2 Gb upload. The speed was the same when using Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10. We tried multiple times but soon we couldn't connect to the internet anymore. We were connecting directly to the ONT as well as using the eero. It turns out there is a limit to how many MAC addresses the ONT allows. My lab computer has a bunch of interfaces so I was trying multiple ports. Luckily Julio saw the ARP table being filled up and he was able to clear it using his phone.
I told him the speed is fine so don't worry about it. He's required to take pictures of 3 separate speed tests so we went to Sonic's speedtest, speedtest.net's, and PCMag's.
After he left I connected my future firewall to the eero's (double-NAT) and installed Ookla's speedtest CLI. That gave better results. It was almost always tilted towards downloads. 8 Gb down, 3 Gb up. The speed is the same if this system is connected directly to the eero. I also tried https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli but it didn't perform well. Around 2 Gb down and up.
The interesting part was when it was doing downloads, there were a lot more threads working vs upload. There's no way to tune the upload. If you use the -vvv argument it will show a configuration JSON that used 4 threads. But there's no way to reference a custom config.
I can't upload more than 3 attachments so here's an Imgur link that shows htop with a speedtest filter while the test is running. You can see a difference in CPU load, too. https://imgur.com/a/svobVAB
Test system specs:
Supermicro X9DRI w/ 64 GB memory, dual E5-26xx v2
Intel X540-T2 NIC
I quickly did another test using a system with dual Xeon 615x CPUs with the same results. I didn't monitor using htop but most likely will use a lot less CPU.
That's about it. Shout out to Julio who was really flexible in accommodating my needs and remembered caulking the entry point with silicone so I didn't need to. Sorry for having you spend a while in my network closet. It is a bit cramped there, underneath the stairs and all.
EDIT: Two days prior, Sonic came out to install the drop cable. My experiences at viewtopic.php?start=30&t=8313.
The technician was punctual. A pleasant surprise compared with the incumbents. My installation window was between 12-4 and Julio arrived at 12:02 having come all the way from Rohnert Park. He left at 2:22.
Sonic uses a transition/fiber interface device box along with an ONT and gateway. My parents were among the first wave of residents to have Sonic Fiber in San Francisco and they have that topology. My fiber interface device is Sonic branded, however. The ONT has 10 Gb and 1 Gb downstream ports but Sonic says the 1 Gb port is disabled (https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/article ... dTran-622v). I was worried they would migrate to a combo ONT/gateway since that's what they were field testing last year and AT&T has also moved towards this direction. The technician told me Sonic has 1 Gb, and 2.5 Gb gateways but the only gateway that supports 10 Gb is the eero Max 7. This doesn't sound right so I created a ticket to Sonic support to get more details. The eero has two 10 Gb ports and two 2.5 Gb ports. Initial setup requires one to download the eero app. It's a typical phone app and feels wrong to manage something like a residential gateway using a phone but that's the way things are going these days. The eero comes pre-configured with the standard Sonic 192.168.4.1 IP but https is not enabled. I want to put the device in bridge mode and while the app will let you do that, eero's website states once it's in bridge mode, it can't be managed by the app anymore. It will still provide WiFi service in bridge mode.
While I migrate my current 1 Gb firewall to another so my concern was how to reset the eero back to automatic mode (route) while it's in bridge. I sent off another email to Sonic support.
I wanted to have the ONT/transition box on the inner side of my garage, next to my network closet and Julio didn't have any concerns. Not wanting to bother him and have him climb up to the top of my garage and route the cable, I did that. Instead of going through the same space where AT&T's cable went I we used the garage's frieze board. If the ONT/transition box is installed where my AT&T ONT currently resides--the outer side of my garage--we would have required a very long fiber patch cord to go from that spot to my network closet. Of course I could have the gateway there, too; but WiFi would be really bad due to the location. Sonic technicians carry 3m patch cables.
The spot where I wanted the transition box already had drywall opened for another project so it was simple fishing the cable. The cable's casing splits into two pieces, exposing the fiber. The casing that's typically discarded can be used for fishing wires as well. I used it to fish the patch cord, roughly 2 meters down the cavity. The casing's slippery texture really helps with fishing unlike regular copper cables. I saved the casings for future use.
- Sonic transition opened.jpg (231.86 KiB) Viewed 1752 times
- Sonic OG transition.jpg (204.04 KiB) Viewed 1752 times
- ATT fusion-spliced.jpg (173.03 KiB) Viewed 1752 times
The technician used a huge 10 Gb dongle to test a high speed connection using his notebook. It was flakey and didn't work. His 1 Gb dongle worked fine. I tried to do it using a lab computer but my speeds were pretty "slow" using a browser. 3.5 Gb download, and around 2 Gb upload. The speed was the same when using Ubuntu 20.04 and Windows 10. We tried multiple times but soon we couldn't connect to the internet anymore. We were connecting directly to the ONT as well as using the eero. It turns out there is a limit to how many MAC addresses the ONT allows. My lab computer has a bunch of interfaces so I was trying multiple ports. Luckily Julio saw the ARP table being filled up and he was able to clear it using his phone.
I told him the speed is fine so don't worry about it. He's required to take pictures of 3 separate speed tests so we went to Sonic's speedtest, speedtest.net's, and PCMag's.
After he left I connected my future firewall to the eero's (double-NAT) and installed Ookla's speedtest CLI. That gave better results. It was almost always tilted towards downloads. 8 Gb down, 3 Gb up. The speed is the same if this system is connected directly to the eero. I also tried https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli but it didn't perform well. Around 2 Gb down and up.
The interesting part was when it was doing downloads, there were a lot more threads working vs upload. There's no way to tune the upload. If you use the -vvv argument it will show a configuration JSON that used 4 threads. But there's no way to reference a custom config.
I can't upload more than 3 attachments so here's an Imgur link that shows htop with a speedtest filter while the test is running. You can see a difference in CPU load, too. https://imgur.com/a/svobVAB
Test system specs:
Supermicro X9DRI w/ 64 GB memory, dual E5-26xx v2
Intel X540-T2 NIC
I quickly did another test using a system with dual Xeon 615x CPUs with the same results. I didn't monitor using htop but most likely will use a lot less CPU.
That's about it. Shout out to Julio who was really flexible in accommodating my needs and remembered caulking the entry point with silicone so I didn't need to. Sorry for having you spend a while in my network closet. It is a bit cramped there, underneath the stairs and all.
