Sonic available for business but not home

[racerlupine]

I checked availability for a couple of addresses where I have waited YEARS for Sonic to reach. (One of the addresses I know for a fact has no copper in the building so DSL is not available in any flavor.) When I checked for home service, the answer was Not Available. Checking for business service, same addresses, suddenly Sonic is all set to sign me up. What's up with that?

RACER

[dane]

Without the address, I can only guess at the situation.

But one example that I'm aware of that looks like this would be that we will sometimes extend the network for a large business on a custom basis. So for example, a business with twenty employees might buy a hosted phone system and multi-gig service from us, spending $1000-$2000/mo, and signing a 36 month or longer agreement to get that. We'll then obtain permits, build custom dedicated underground fiber to their building, on the basis of that long-term financial committment.

This is different than the commodity residential and small-business service, which is sold for $50-$90 monthly, with no committment. We can't feasibly do a $15,000 custom build-out to a $50/mo site.

[racerlupine]

Dane, thanks for the reply. I will PM you the addresses if you're interested. Both are in San Francisco; one is downtown near Market and Van Ness and the other is in the Outer Sunset. The downtown is a new (2 years old now) SRO building, the other is a single family house built around 1940 I think. My ex runs a business out of the Sunset house but it's nowhere near the scale you're talking about. His neighbor directly across the street has Sonic internet, it's DSL using the venerable Pace modem/router. They're not running a business (that I know of) and for certain they aren't shelling out thousands for internet service. I'm just wondering why, of the two houses so close to each other (1224 and 1235 XXth Av) one can get Sonic and the other can't.

Anyway your explanation of the Home versus Business angle makes perfect sense, thanks for taking the time to write it for the board.

RACER