AT&T Buyout of Sonic Customers?

[robdawg96]

Hey all,

I'm in the Outer Sunset and just had some "AT&T" door-to-door personnel come by offering to buy-out Sonic customers and offering $55 with fees + taxes, gift-card reimbursement for any Sonic.net cancellation/service charges. They mentioned that it would be the same speed 1gb + no data cap and same reliable service with no annual increases in fees like Sonic. Seemed a little sketchy they were collecting name, address, DL and e-mail in order to get e-mails for the offer. I had asked for promotion letter and a business card but they refused and mentioned "digital age, no paper" as a reason to not give any advertisement of this offer.

Seemed sketch so I opted not to provide them my information but was wondering if anyone else answered the door for these gentlemen.

[psireau]

It's legit, that's how they do their marketing. They've just recently deployed fiber in San Francisco and they figured that having people go door to door is a more effective marketing strategy than mailing flyers. You can find the details of their offer on their website.

That being said, some of these salespeople are not afraid to bend the truth or outright lie:

gift-card reimbursement for any Sonic.net cancellation/service charges

That's true... but they conveniently forgot to mention that Sonic does not have cancellation charges on their residential fiber service, so you can't take advantage of that "offer".

same reliable service with no annual increases in fees like Sonic

AT&T gives no written guarantees their prices won't increase: they can and have increased their prices in the past, having done so as recently as two weeks ago: https://att.com/internetpricechange/
A quick Google search for "at&t internet price increase" will show you that it's not uncommon, with some customers even reporting multiple price increases within the same year.

offering $55 with fees + taxes [...] same speed 1gb + no data cap

That's true, and that's what ultimately convinced me to jump ship. While $5 does not sound like a big difference, the problem is that Sonic bundles voice service on their 1gbps offer, resulting in stupidly high taxes (over $15 in San Francisco):
- my bill with Sonic was $77.59 ($59.99 for Fusion 1Gbps and the rest is all taxes)
- my bill with AT&T is $55.23 ($55.00 for 1Gbps service and $0.23 in sales tax)

I would have been more than happy to pay an extra $5 to stay with Sonic, "supporting the little guy" with a better stance on net neutrality, but an extra $20 is just too much of a difference to ignore.

In my opinion, as things currently stand:
- if your area has Sonic 10gbps, then Sonic is the clear winner (because the speeds are unmatched, and because Sonic does not bundle voice service on their 10gbps offer)
- if your area has Sonic 1gbps, then AT&T may be a better choice (at least until Sonic stops bundling voice service on their 1gbps offer)

[rcoaster]

I had an AT&T guy come to my door a week or two ago. He did not specifically know that I had Sonic service, but when I described what I have and require, he gave up easily and walked away.

[lyser]

Similar in Sacramento. I have had 50mbps Sonic (via ATT) fiber since it was first offered.

Just now I got that same pitch at my front door, ATT 300mbps for $55 + 0.30 tax, total. Or gigabit for $80.

But no brochure or even business card is available to refer to, after his presentation.

Was told that ATT has cancelled the Sonic contract - which runs over obsolete ATT "half-fiber" that will soon be shut down. True?

The guy wasn't convincing that he even represented ATT. When he refused to provide a brochure or contact information, I ended the conversation.

Question - is what he said real? And upgrading my Sonic connection to gigabit is no longer available here?

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[artakamoose]

Is your service 50 or was that a typo and it's 500?
50 mbps service is FTTN, which means fiber to a cabinet and then copper from the cabinet to your house.
500 mbps service is FTTH, which means they ran fiber all the way to your house.

Sonic used to resell both services I believe, but they aren't anymore due to a prohibitive increase in the price AT&T was charging them.

AT&T is shutting down their old copper network (which includes FTTN service) and migrating everyone to either FTTH or their fixed wireless service. There's no specific date this is happening though since it's being done piecemeal across the country and it's going to take years for them to complete. The question is, are they really shutting down your FTTN service in Sac? The door-to-door salespeople are notorious liars, so do trust a word they say. When your service is actually getting shutdown, you will get an official communication from either Sonic or AT&T.

Since Sonic doesn't resell AT&T service anymore, I'm guessing you won't be able to covert from resold AT&T FTTN to resold AT&T FTTH. But I'm no AT&T door salesman, so I'd call Sonic sales and ask them.

[lyser]

Thanks for the reply,

50 mbps service is FTTN, which means fiber to a cabinet and then copper from the cabinet to your house.
500 mbps service is FTTH

Speedtest reports 60/60 mbps most of the time. Location Sacramento.

Several years ago when fiber became available here (Sonic over ATT lines), I ordered 50 mbps fiber to replace DSL. I thought I got fiber clear to the house. I recall watching the tech do a fiber cut&polish at my outdoor box.

After a while Sonic advertised gigabit fiber via ATT for the same monthly price. Sonic's customer support looked at my file and said this upgrade could be done but ATT would cause a shutdown of a couple of weeks, so we never got around to it.

Now when I want to do that upgrade I've learned it is no longer available. And that the overall relationship between Sonic and ATT no longer exists. I got the impression from the Sonic customer support rep that he was surprised that I still have signal. He said ATT is letting the now-obsolete circuits I'm on, degrade from neglect.

Looks like I have no choice but become an ATT customer.

[artakamoose]

Please disregard some of what I said. It looks like you're in rare air. The vast majority of AT&T Internet 50 customers were on their FTTN offering; but I just looked it up, and it looks like some people were able to order 50/50 FTTH. Most people with AT&T FTTH have only been offered some combo of 100/300/500/1G/2G/5G service.

If you're on 50/50 FTTH, I'd say it's highly unlikely you're going to get shutdown. I'd say it's worth calling Sonic to see if they can still upgrade you to a higher bandwidth tier if you want it.

[brandonc]

Thanks for the reply,

50 mbps service is FTTN, which means fiber to a cabinet and then copper from the cabinet to your house.
500 mbps service is FTTH

Speedtest reports 60/60 mbps most of the time. Location Sacramento.

Several years ago when fiber became available here (Sonic over ATT lines), I ordered 50 mbps fiber to replace DSL. I thought I got fiber clear to the house. I recall watching the tech do a fiber cut&polish at my outdoor box.

After a while Sonic advertised gigabit fiber via ATT for the same monthly price. Sonic's customer support looked at my file and said this upgrade could be done but ATT would cause a shutdown of a couple of weeks, so we never got around to it.

Now when I want to do that upgrade I've learned it is no longer available. And that the overall relationship between Sonic and ATT no longer exists. I got the impression from the Sonic customer support rep that he was surprised that I still have signal. He said ATT is letting the now-obsolete circuits I'm on, degrade from neglect.

Looks like I have no choice but become an ATT customer.

Hi Lyser,

I checked your account and you're indeed on FTTH 50mbps/50mbps over our resold AT&T service in Sacramento. Even though we have ended our business relationship with AT&T, we don't anticipate our resold FTTH to be disconnected. Although, we cannot provide any upgrades as we no longer can order new AT&T services.

However, at your other location, you have our FTTN, which is partly copper infrastructure. AT&T could choose to discontinue leasing the infrastructure or increase the price for us to resell the service in the next several years. In either case, Sonic will provide notice well in advance to all our customers on FTTN/DSL services to inform them of the situation when the time comes.


Kind regards,

[lyser]

Hi Lyser,

I checked your account and you're indeed on FTTH 50mbps/50mbps over our resold AT&T service in Sacramento. Even though we have ended our business relationship with AT&T, we don't anticipate our resold FTTH to be disconnected. Although, we cannot provide any upgrades as we no longer can order new AT&T services.

However, at your other location, you have our FTTN, which is partly copper infrastructure. AT&T could choose to discontinue leasing the infrastructure or increase the price for us to resell the service in the next several years. In either case, Sonic will provide notice well in advance to all our customers on FTTN/DSL services to inform them of the situation when the time comes
Kind regards,

Brandon, thank you for looking into this! It's good to learn that the Sacramento FTTH service is likely to continue. 50 mbps works ok for our light use, YouTube and Whatsapp videos etc.

As for the rural Sebastopol DSL (speed 10 down, 0.3 to 3 mbps up), it feels like ATT's neglected stepchild. I suspect one bottleneck is slow DNS lookup. Real country living. I hope you can run fiber out there some day. (A half mile from ATT's FTTN box at Bloomfield Rd/ Kennedy/ PH intersection).

I tried a friend's MetroPCS/TMobile phone hotspot at both locations. Both were hopelessly slow.

I admire Sonic and will remain a subscriber as long as possible.

What happened to the PUC (?) ruling that ATT had to share their monopoly infrastructure? Is Sonic appealing this termination? Any hope it will resume?

[rcoaster]

What happened to the PUC (?) ruling that ATT had to share their monopoly infrastructure? Is Sonic appealing this termination? Any hope it will resume?

TRUMP is what happened, and his weasel FCC appointee, Ajit Pai. Disgusting scum, through and through.

This all should have been instantly fixed at the end of January 2021, but it still has not been.

Individual states are not allowed to set their own laws/policy about communications services in most cases, so we here in California are stuck with the national-level policies.