Fusion price increase and fiber expansion

[joeyyung911]

Way to drag politics and hostility into this thread. Why don't you put that anger towards the people who were voted into the city? I'm as pissed as anyone else, getting less than 10mbps, but lambasting him for not responding to a day-old comment?

I'm still on the fence. I have 2 internet connections with Sonic...one still in a contract, which I will ride out and hope things progressed by the end of it. The 10mbps connection, OTH, I've been shopping. 100+mbps for the same price is tempting.

[Guest]

Dane, you've long said that Fiber is only rolling out to those communities and neighborhoods that have the largest Sonic Fusion / FTTN subscriber bases.

Another way of looking at this is that I won't see a return on my $10 per month investment (no Fiber) unless my community significantly ramps up subscription rates to Sonics services.

Like others, I don't mind investing if I know a return on that investment is coming. I think this is the wrong pricing model to impose on your customers. The carrot has been dangled for years, but a precious few will ever benefit.

[vadimsf]

Thank you for your response. I'm 5000 feet from the central office, and I have veen getting too many promises from Sonic and Dane for years. I am now questionining the integrity of Sonic and its CEO.

Did you know that Sonic now has 350 people, and nothing is getting better. Maybe it is trying to get $10 from everyone to pay for 350 people's salaries.

I also heard that there is Google Fiber project is in SF but not in my area. If Google is not there, then I know I won't get Sonic Fiber. Or mabye SOnic Fiber will be using GOogle Fiber?

I suspect that Sonic CEO probably knows it will take years to get Fiber to be available for everyone (esp ones in SF) and he is now pulling $10 from me. That is why I dragged politics into that. Doesn't that sound familiar to you? ;-( .

yes, I am very angry. I am now exploring alternatives right now. btw, ceo has not responsed to my comment which is now two days old. i am also working with support to look into why i am getting 10mb instead of 20mb if i am 5000 feet from central office, and i have been told that the support is very busy and handling lot of customers at this time. maybe that is where 10 goes ... not into fiber.....

Way to drag politics and hostility into this thread. Why don't you put that anger towards the people who were voted into the city? I'm as pissed as anyone else, getting less than 10mbps, but lambasting him for not responding to a day-old comment?

I'm still on the fence. I have 2 internet connections with Sonic...one still in a contract, which I will ride out and hope things progressed by the end of it. The 10mbps connection, OTH, I've been shopping. 100+mbps for the same price is tempting.

[Guest]

WHEN DID IT BECOME A REASONABLE THING TO CHARGE EVERYONE THE SAME AMOUNT REGARDLESS OF WHAT THEY"RE BUYING? Getting Gigabit? Have we got a deal for you! Stuck (possibly for ever) on 2mb decaying copper? Sorry about that!
EVERYONE else, including all the bad guys, at least charge based on tiers or service levels. Please rethink this "one price fits all" strategy. Something like: Gigabit - $55, FTTN - $50, Copper - $40 would be much more palatable.

Totally agree, this story that Sonic keeps trotting out about its "one price" strategy is just aggravating nonsense. It simply DOESN'T result in "one price," not when you consider that different people are getting different things. Got gigabit fiber? Your price is $0.05 per mbps. Got creaky old 2 mbps DSL? Your price is $25 per mbps. DIFFERENT! And that's assuming that everyone really DOES get charged $50 ($40 plus the $10 hike), but it's even worse than that ... SOME users have to pay more for VOIP ATA rental ... MOST have to pay more for modem rental (but not if you have fiber!! Get more, pay less!) .... MOST have to pay significant POTS-related taxes (most? maybe it's all; I'm not sure if FTTN customers have to pay these taxes, since they have VOIP rather than POTS) ... SOME have to pay for X2 service in order to get decent speed. So Sonic has billing rates that are all over the map, and service performance that's all over the map, and THERE IS SIMPLY NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO!! That's nuts.

[vadimsf]

I echo with you. Did Dane ever respond to your concerns? This is insane.

This is disappointing. I'd feel ok with it if I thought it was going to get fiber to my neighborhood faster. But I doubt my part of SF will get fiber anytime this decade, so what seems to be happening here is that I get to pay for fiber to be deployed in more expensive neighborhoods than mine, with no benefit for me, instead of charging it to the folks getting the fiber who can generally afford it more easily anyway. It would show some class if customers who have to pay this extra $10/month for other people's fiber were offered some kind of credit towards getting fiber themselves if/when it does finally become available to them (again I expect it to be years away for most of us).

I also remember hearing of various upgrades to voice service being explained as coming from declining costs in a defined-profit product. That was nice, free international calls weren't something I really use, but since it wasn't costing me extra then why not. Except now it is costing extra, in that the surplus that got directed into free international calls could have gone to fiber build-out instead of raising basic service prices on everyone. I'd vote for eliminating the free international calls since I've made maybe 10 minutes of international calls in the past 10 years.

I do find landline phone service to be useful but I don't feel like I even need free domestic calling let alone international. I'd be happy with 60 minutes/month included, then 1 or 2 cents per additional minute. Similarly with the popular fax service--popular? Faxes are even still a thing? I can't remember the last time I saw one. I'd even be willing to drop my Fusion voice phone altogether since I could still use my mobile for occasional voice calls. Mobile voice quality is worse but I could live with it.

I also have zero interest in Dish TV. And personal web hosting=valuable? Not really, that's available free or almost free from a million places. I particularly like afreecloud.com (zero cost) and buyshared.net (starts at $5/year), both providing much more flexible service than Sonic personal pages. It's ok that Sonic hosting is seemingly decades behind the times since I understand Sonic treating it as a legacy product, but in that case it shouldn't be pitched as valuable in the present day. I do like the idea of Sonic OpenVPN and plan to start using it sometime, so that's something.

I like Sonic and dislike Comcast enough to pay around the same amount for Fusion at around 7 mbps as Comcast charges for 25+ megabits but now it will be flat-out more expensive too (and no, X2 Fusion isn't available at my location).

Between the overloaded tech support, the antiquated VOIP ATA's where Sonic fiber is available instead of SIP, the recurring voice outages in those places, etc. I start to perceive that the price increase actually reflects Sonic being financially overextended and maybe even circling the drain. I hope it can recover. But addressing the problem by having most of Sonic's customers subsidize fiber for the lucky minority that can get it is not that nice.

How often do other ISP's increase prices with no meaningful service increases anyway? I don't think I've ever seen that. This is the IT industry which is an area where advancing technology normally makes costs lower rather than higher.

[vadimsf]

I was told the same thing. I feel that Sonic and Dane lied to us. Period.

I am quite upset by this rate increase. When I signed up for Sonic a little over a year ago, one of the things that won me over is that the Sonic representative on the phone promised me that once I became a customer, the price would be locked in for as long as I am a customer. I repeated what I heard to him and he said, "yes, you will get this price for as long as you are a customer. Your rate will not increase." Now, just a bit over a year later, I'm asked to pay $10 more a month. I am disappointed and felt a bit cheated and lied to that Sonic is not upholding its promise to me. Honestly, when I was an AT&T customer, I experienced faster speed and a lesser need to call customer support. Now that Sonic is increasing its price to basically be the same price as AT&T, I don't see any reason not to go back to AT&T.

[Guest]

I can only hope that this additional revenue does something to improve service for those of us who are stuck with 4 mbs Fusion. When I upgraded to Fusion, I was achieving over 7 mbs, this has eroded for unknown reasons to 4 mbs....nothing has changed on my end....including the cost of the lesser performing broadband.

Thank you. I'm stuck too, just for the economics of it. Going from dialup to Fusion six years ago was great; for me the initial ~4 Mbps was great, by comparison, and I also understood the distance thing. So now that's a slow speed. Fine... it serves my needs adequately. Just don't get slower.

But it did.

Yes, for unknown reasons. No, nothing changed at my end either. And their reading from the boilerplate support script was useless. That's when I knew things had changed... at their end. Today there's no doubt. And there will be no improvement to Fusion X1 speed or reliability, ever, because copper is irrelevant, and AT&T won't be checking all their leaky bridge taps, and Sonic can't make them, nor wants to.

They'd actually capped my DL, without my knowledge, as some kind of solution, which was really barking up the wrong tree. It was only by accident that I discovered this (already wondering why I was so much further below max available), and I had them remove the cap immediately. It had made no difference in dropped sync or sudden echo episodes. I have to check the gateway every_single_day to make sure the line hasn't suddenly deteriorated again. Now I'll be paying 25% more for that member privilege.

[toddfx]

I'm not sure doubling down on the whole egalitarian angle is going to serve sonic too well. I already felt like I was "taking one for the team" by paying full price for appallingly low bandwidth (7 down/1 up). The thing about upsetting the status quo when you have a stagnant product is that it causes the customer to start looking at other options. Comcast just finished dragging a wire to my house and hooking me up

[Half serious] Look what you've made me do, Dane! I used to mock people that had Comcast! Now I'm one of them! [sob].

It's holding steady at 30 down 6 up for about $15 less that I was paying for 7/1. $25 less than the new price. I guess this includes losing a POTS line I neither wanted nor used. If it ever does start to rain toads from the sky and Sonic pulls fiber to Vallejo I may re-up. Until then, So long and thanks for all the bytes!

[mark.a.craig]

Dane Jesper, I am waiting for your response to this. In addition this seems to reflect the Trump culture (haves and havenots). Is Sonic trying to become like a Trump empire?

Moreso than that, Jesper has been painting himself as a populist Internet Man of the People for decades before Trump got - or was taught - the idea to use the same brush on himself. It has been gainful for both. For both, a part of their asset is their own constructed mythos, and the choices that can (mis)lead people to make. The two seem to have a number of things in common. Jesper 2024?

[customerInExcelsior]

Whoa - the vitriol in this forum is getting ridiculous! I'd say it's mostly angry reaction to the price increase - and the corresponding decrease in value - but there's no need for such harsh words! Voting with your wallets will have more of an impact than complaining on this forum, as Dane seems firm in his decision (as is his right).

All any of us can really do is cancel/switch and wait things out. As has been pointed out by several people, many of us have alternatives. For the "haves", I would ask you to hold back your criticisms against the "have-nots" - especially if they wait out the fiber build-up and rejoin. It's their right to do so, and I don't see why they should be have to justify or defend their decision when Sonic no longer provides them with the best value (and will not provide anything close, anytime soon)! At the end of the day, Sonic is a business, and as ethical as they might be, they still need to make money. As consumers, we must decide what we value most and where to spend our dollars. No one should be made to feel bad - why be loyal to a company that doesn't care about your (not your neighbor's) best interests (in the short-to-mid term, not 10 years down the line)?

For the have-nots, just leave Sonic if the value is no longer there. AT&T offers Internet-only DSL connectivity (up to 24Mbps) for $50/mo, with a 12-month agreement, $99 installation, and $50 back. The 6Mbps offering is essentially $40/mo because of equipment rental. There's a 1TB cap with AT&T, which most people seem okay with. DSL Extreme offers unlimited downloads for slightly more. For those (like me) who don't have access to their Internet 24 offering, but want more than 6Mbps - get Xfinity. Comcast charges $40/mo for 25Mbps, with a 12-month agreement. Find yourself a cheap DOCSIS modem, and you won't need to rent one. After the year is up, pay ~$60/mo, which is probably still better than Sonic (except for the transfer cap). For those in Raw Bandwidth DSL's service area, they offer Internet-only ADSL2+ service up to 20Mbps for $50/mo! And if you're in Monkeybrains's service area in SF, 8Mbps-40Mbps service is only $35/mo, with an installation fee of $250.

Sonic's going to be fine in the long-run, even if everyone with crappy download speeds leave. If it hurts them too bad - who knows, maybe they might introduce a reduced-price offering for slow areas at a later time. I think this thread has run its course - nothing will change, except for the price increase, so figure out some way to deal with it. Further mud slinging isn't going to change things.