Sonic.net

I'm in san francisco, and I'm hit with almost 30.00 taxes a month on my two-line bonded DSL.
all the taxes are on the voice lines, which I don't even use or have connected to a handset.

My 89.95 a month (quite nice, really) bonded DSL balloons to $120.00 or so, just because Sonic
wants to keep their offerings to a minimum number, and keep the math simple.

Ok: here's some simple math:

I'd pay MORE for my bonded DSL (100.00 bucks?) to avoid having to pay 120.00, of which 30 is taxes, which sonic
has to pass on to uncle sam.

free money for Sonic?

I wonder what the incremental cost of revising your offerings to include a dry-loop option actually is.
what is the size of the potential dry-loop customers that would be willing to pay 10-ish bucks more per
line to delete the 15 bucks of voice taxes?

I'd be shocked if it wasn't above 50% that wouldn't give up the land line for a net $5 per line discount.

so, I pay less, sonic gets more profit. who loses? fewer bombs for uncle sam.

As another bonded 2 line user, I'd switch tomorrow if they had this.

Even sweeter would be if I could drop voice on both lines and just use my VoIP setup.

Before voice was launched, we offered "dry pair" Fusion service without voice for $50.00. That's a savings of a couple dollars versus the offering today of $39.95 plus typical local, state and federal taxes and fees.

But it came with some challenges for us. Here are a few of them that come to mind right now:

If we "hot cut" your existing pair while porting in your telephone number, you are on proven copper. 50% of new Sonic.net customers come over from AT&T this way, and they have a seamless experience, a quality copper pair and high reliability. If you are provisioning a new "dry" pair, you're getting the available copper, which may be fine - or may not be.

If we hot cut the existing pair, we almost never need to make a visit to install the service, saving the customer the installation truck roll fee. Based upon our current actual cost for this, that's about $75 in savings we can pass on, so the extra couple dollars per month in taxes and fees would be weighed against this.

If there's no dial tone on a pair, field techs sometimes mistake it for available and will take the pair and use it for another customer.

...but, in California, if a carrier's equipment is "capable of providing 911 service", we have an obligation to provide it. The current Fusion product's infrastructure can deliver dialtone and emergency 911 capability, so we must provide at least that capability. This necessitates allocation of a telephone number, 911 database integration, all the e911 inter-tie, etc. A surprising amount of the cost of providing voice goes into 911 for us, and it's not something we could likely "save". (There's one way around this: we could deploy "dumb" cards that only did data, so the network wouldn't be capable for dry pair customers. But this requires totally different hardware in every CO, allocation to that hardware, etc - and then you could never in future turn ON voice for someone who wanted to add it.)

That's all I can think of right at this moment, as to why we retired the former $50 offering. Clearly, we could have kept it in some form, but our model has been moving more and more toward a "include everything, all circuits configured the same" model. This is a key point I suppose: a single product eases our sales, marketing and support burdens and allows us to reduce our costs. As sales, support and field installation is a huge share of the overhead in our products, simplification results in lower costs.

We had two paths to choose: ala carte, where we'd sell raw access for one low price, then nickle and dime all the various features, allowing customers to chose from the card whatever they specifically wanted. Maybe phone would be an extra $20 - even though it costs far less to add it on - shell, usenet, vpn, email, etc could also be unbundled.

But the complexity of going this route is huge, so we went totally the other direction: everything is bundled and included. Some people use less of one thing or another, and the costs and revenue are all blended. When more customers sign up and revenue increases, if margins go up with throw in more "free" stuff for everyone. We've got a roadmap that hopefully will bring more and more useful capabilities to the Fusion platform for all of you, as the customer base continues to grow.

Thanks Dane. As always, it's good to get a straight answer from an ISP. not really what I want to hear, but the most relevant paragraph above spells it out: you must provide 911 if the hardware is capable. this means that gubmint interference once again distorts the market. <rant deleted>. it makes no sense for you to support both kinds of hardware, one with voice capability, and one without. I'll just roll over and render unto caesar until I can get fiber.
--curt

I also would sign up immediately for a non-voice product.

I would happily pay your regular $39.95 (plus modem) for a data-only product. You'd get the same revenue as for a regular Fusion customer - so your providing 911 etc is a wash - and I wouldn't have to pay taxes for a service I don't want and wouldn't even connect. The 911 requirement doesn't make sense to me anyway: ATT offers dry loops. Furthermore, if there's 911-only dial tone on an ATT dry loop, then your objection about identifying in-use loops also doesn't hold. As far as I can tell, disabling voice doesn't really affect you aside from simplifying your billing, support, and tax remittance.

I would be willing to pay extra one-time costs to set this up, as I would save at least $100/year.

I'll keep checking in periodically to see if you relent on this.

Or perhaps we should have a hundle for bonded 2 lines plus one phone???

Dane, what a great answer. Thanks for that. I would love to ditch the phone line fees too, but I now see how that would be problematic.

happy_sonic_customer wrote:Or perhaps we should have a hundle for bonded 2 lines plus one phone???

Yes, please! Dane, is the 911 requirement per line or per location?

I'd gladly sign up for 2-line bonded DSL with one POTS line. As it stands, my Fusion sync rate is barely more than 1 Mb/s due to AT&T's crappy copper. Nearly $120 for bonded Fusion (with taxes and fees) (and is there still an extra fee for a static IP address with the bonded service?) is just too much, so I'm tempted to switch to Comcast, as much as I dread the thought.