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 2025-02-07: An unusual edit, since DSLreports.com has been not a very stable site I've elected to preserve my last Sonic review here.
join: 2001-11-08
member for 23.2 years, 205 visits, last login: 31 days ago
updated 31 days ago
(2025-January)
Updated with the actual price. No contract terms.
Returning the eero cost $15 but it was well worth it to ensure the line worked as expected using supported equipment. We got the first 3 months free.
= OLD =
(2024-November)
We migrated away from Sonic to AT&T in August 2021 to get a better price because the FX1 service was not sufficient for our growing household. We couldn't upgrade to other FX packages and the only alternative was the 1 Gb resold AT&T package. Sonic was renegotiating with AT&T on reselling fiber packages so the FX tiers were dropped. My wife preferred going with AT&T's 300 Mbps (over-provisioned to 360 Mbps) package for less cost because we could drop telephone service.
Around February 2023 we found out Sonic was building out their network to our city so we pre-ordered. I anticipated installation would take a while due to all the posts on their Access forums at forums.sonic.net. I personally guessed over a year, maybe 1.5 years. Actual elapsed time was 1 year 9 months.
Sonic has a status page and they gave an estimate of February 2024. It got pushed a month or two until it got to December 2024. A part of the delay was described from a post where some of the fiber was installed incorrectly. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 0#p65220
It wasn't until early November 2024 that we got an email notification that our install date would be on November 10.
So as to not repeat what I wrote, I will link to my post at Sonic. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· ?t=18110.
Sonic's infrastructure hasn't changed since my parents got Sonic Fiber in 2016. They still use a separate ONT that is mechanically terminated from the drop cable to an SC-APC connector, unlike AT&T's fusion splice. The separate ONT is welcomed because I don't want an all-in-one ONT/gateway as I have my own hardware. They are deploying 10 Gb (XGS-PON) exclusively so they no longer require telephone service for subscribers.
One thing I didn't know was those who pre-ordered would get 1 or 2 (I recall 2) months' service free. But I never considered this perk.
When my wife called AT&T to cancel, they did not prorate our last month of service only stating we paid for the entire month. Sonic prorated our last month's service when we switched in 2021.
(2019-September-12)
Upgraded through Sonic's member portal to AT&T resold fiber. Three tiers are offered FX1 50 Mb, FX2 100 Mb, FX3 1000 Mb, all symmetric, no caps. AT&T has these tiers to my premises, 100 Mb, 300 Mb, 1000 Mb--the first 2 have 1 TB caps.
I chose the FX1 upgrade.
AT&T came to my home twice. The first time was after 10 days from my change order. They couldn't activate the ONT for unknown reasons. The tech had to call his support but after 1.5 hours they decided to cancel my order and create a new one with a followup visit. First visit took around 3.5 hours, 2 of them were to survey and ran a new outdoor fiber cable from a pole further down the street to another pole closest to my house then to my garage. The remaining time the tech tried to activate the ONT but didn't work. Second visit took less than an hour to just activate the ONT. The tech still couldn't do it but support was able to do so remotely. I was given a BGW210-700 RG. Since my service was 50 Mb, the RG showed the ONT port set to 100 Mb. Speed tests showed some overprovisioning. Latency is around 5 ms through IP Passthrough.
Sonic shipped me a new Grandstream HT801 ATA that's preprogrammed for my upgrade. Once the service was up, I left my old Grandstream ATA running on my VDSL Pace 5031NV RG. I asked Sonic tech support on the process and they told me the number port won't happen unless I start using the new ATA. The time between the number port was less than a day as opposed to my ADSL to VDSL upgrade's port that took 10 days.
Unlike the 5031NV RG, the BGW210-700 doesn't have DMZ+. Instead it has IP Passthrough. Functionally they are similar but the problem with IP Passthrough is people on this site state sessions are enforced by the BGW210. On the 5031NV, the sessions available actually drop to 0 but my 3rd-party firewall will still handle sessions over 1024. The BGW210 has 8K sessions. There is a bug in the BGW210: if I change the device access code authentication is disabled. I have not rebooted the RG to check if that will correct this behavior.
There was one unexpected problem with the phone number port. All my contacts on my soft phone (Accession, and Sonic Mobile Communicator) were wiped. Even the transition number's contacts were empty. Sonic is aware of the issue and should warn/auto-migrate for future subscribers.
My post on Sonic's forums: »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· &t=13495
EDIT (2015-June-02): Looks like the trouble with the modem's web server going AWOL is due to some memory leak. Sonic has indicated they've had the same experience with another Pace CPE. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 7#p18787
EDIT (2015-May): Sonic's legacy ADSL1 tools indicated my legacy connection was being sunset and I could migrate to their Fusion FTTN product. Fusion FTTN is resold AT&T U-verse. I was one of the first customers who migrated from legacy ADSL1 to FTTN so there were a few unexpected roadblocks on Sonic's infrastructure end that delayed service completion. The service change requires a 12-month commitment followed by month-to-month commitment. Any change to the subscription (X2/bonding) will reset the commitment to 12-months+month-to-month. My migration did not let me choose pair bonding (X2), but I can change at any time. My old AT&T telephone number was ported to Sonic's VoIP. But because the process was new it took 10 business days from the time I got connected. Sonic does not want to queue up the porting process because they have no way of knowing when a subscriber would get connected. I was given a temporary VoIP number during the interim. So from the time I ordered online, I got connected after 19 days. And then 10 business days (14 calendar days) after that my phone was ported. Dane at Sonic told us the phone porting process should take 3-4 business days.
Major benefits of Sonic's Fusion FTTN legacy ADSL1 are:
1. More speed than 6 Mbps downstream. Some individuals may not be served by a VRAD but even for those situations they will get a small boost in speed because U-verse will use PTM instead of ATM, which eliminates some encapsulation overhead.
2. Phone service provided without having to subscribe to an AT&T land line.
3. No transfer caps written in the Terms of Service.
A traditional land line is beneficial however the only portion of our internet subscription's bill that has gone up is the land line from around $20 to over $30 during the past 3-4 years. What used to cost around $75/month for Sonic's ADSL1 @ 6 Mbps is now $56.19 ($40 is the base internet service, while the rest are the gateway/ATA rental and telephone fees): FTTN @ 18 Mbps, overprovisioned to 23 Mbps and all the benefits of Sonic's Fusion phone service: call waiting, forwarding, 8 hours of borderless calling, etc.
Sonic's FTTN phone is VoIP and they supply a Grandstream HT701 ATA. Softphone capability exists through Accession. The ATA is configured on Sonic's end and the device's configuration is locked out. Like all CPEs, there is a "reset configuration" button on the ATA. One must be aware that if one pushes that button, all configuration specific to the customer will be lost and one has to contact Sonic to get the configuration resynchronized.
Disadvantages to Sonic's Fusion FTTN are:
1. The phone is VoIP so if the internet is down, the phone won't work. As someone who likes to play with equipment I am not a fan of the device being locked out so I can't monitor it. Sonic's members tools page contains some settings we can change. The ATA requires a rental fee of $6.50/month.
2. The gateway is supplied by AT&T since they own the entire infrastructure, unlike in legacy ADSL1 where Sonic has more control. I am forced to rent a gateway (Pace 5031nv) for the service at $6.50/month. Like all AT&T gateways they are substandard because a lot of their features are either disabled or not available. Features like true bridge mode, SNMP monitoring, and telnet/ssh interface are not there. Since U-verse requires 802.1x authentication using the certificate embedded within the modem all subscribers need to use an approved gateway.
3. Because the entire FTTN infrastructure is owned by AT&T Fusion FTTN subscribers get an AT&T IP unlike in legacy ADSL1 where I got a Sonic IP. Sonic is planning to provide static IP addresses that are in the Sonic IP space but it will most likely come in the form of a VPN connection.
4. Speeds in Fusion FTTN are capped according to AT&T's tiered model. For those who are on Sonic's regular Fusion subscription, are close enough to the CO, and whose line cards have been upgraded to VDSL2, they get uncapped bandwidth. So if pair's maximum sync rate is over 50 Mbps, they should get close to that accounting for margin instead of the normal U-verse 25311 Kbps rate. Fusion FTTN does not have a 32 Mbps tier.
5. The gateway takes around 2 minutes to boot. My guess is most of this time is spent in recreating the device's local certificates since the web page's SSL cert changes after each reboot. My old Cayman 3546 that I used for legacy ADSL1 took less than 10 seconds to boot.
6. I monitor my modem's statistics using a script created by TestBoy »/profi ··· /1681305 that I modified. »Perl script to grab data from the NVG589. If I get the stats every 5 minutes, the gateway's web server will return 404 errors for all pages after 3.5 days. My internet connection still works and I can still ping the gateway. When I did the same for my 3546 using its telnet interface I had no such issue. More info later.
My post on Sonic's forums: »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 4#p17844
Finally a shout out to the AT&T techs who did the install. They were fantastic.
EDIT (~2013/2014): System asked for an update. Sonic continues to be a great ISP. While our underlying AT&T service has seen price increases, our Sonic ADSL1 service has remained steady. Service has been very stable. I can't create another review for Sonic, but my parents' service from Sonic.net is also working well. They have seen service features added such as free calls to all 50 states, free calls to most-called country per continent, free static IP with no additional increase in monthly payment. My in-laws have seen their U-verse go from a promotional $50/month to $70 for 1.5Mbps service.
EDIT (2011): got the go-live date incorrect. I couldn't update the stats in my original post but around 2 weeks ago, I noticed a phone cord that was not connected to a phone had the DSL filter at its tail end. The telephone cord was connected to the wall, followed by the filter.
Moving the filter to the wall first caused the modem's noise margin to improve from 13-14 dB to 17-18 dB. Don't know what I was thinking when I connected the filter--most likely laziness in my part was a big factor.
(2011) I switched from 6Mbps AT&T legacy ADSL1 service after being served by them for around 10 years because of its transfer cap policy. Having seen Dane's interview at Triangulation »twit.tv/tri5 I decided to give them a try. It's unfortunate I couldn't get Fusion since I'm served off a remote terminal. Sonic also resells AT&T's legacy ADSL1 services but requires that I remain an AT&T phone customer. This is the route I took. Since I just switched ADSL1 providers, the turnaround was ~3 days--I was told 3-5 days--instead of the 5-14 for Fusion. The longer forecast is for people who have AT&T U-verse and a new wire needs to be pulled to a customer's home. The actual go live date was a Monday morning.
Sonic's CPE use ATM bridged encapsulation instead of PPPoE so my Netopia 3546-002 continues to work with the same VPI/VCI numbers with the required change in encapsulation. I was confused by a modem's network bridge mode vs. ATM bridged encapsulation but the people in the Sonic.net forum set me straight.
They offer a modem with rebate for the cost of the device if you sign up for 12 months. The rebate does not include shipping charge. I found that attractive and if things work out, I will give the modem to my parents as I migrate them away from AT&T as they qualify for Sonic Fusion. Sonic currently has a 12-month commitment discount of $20/month over the regular price of $39.95/month for 6Mbps. The monthly cost I entered does not include this discount but includes my AT&T telco portion--and is essentially the same price as my old AT&T package. If I could get Fusion, my cost would have dropped to around $50.
Sonic offers some free services to their ISP customers. Their webpage describes them in detail but the one I thought was valuable is FAX send and receive capability--which I've used several times already. An interesting retro service is shell access but you need to register first as I was not able to login. You're also given free web space with some quota but I have not provisioned the service either. Finally, a nice touch is they provide a Cisco VPN client for their VPN gateways.
A caveat for people considering going to Sonic from AT&T ADSL1 to Sonic ADSL1 is you need to let Sonic know your current speed so you can carry that over. Some people have had AT&T's 6Mbps package but got bumped down to 3Mbps after the switch over and AT&T would not re-provision the line at 6Mbps.
»Cayman 3546-002 w/ Sonic.net documents my transition.
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 7232 times
- Sonic OG transition.jpg (204.04 KiB) Viewed 7232 times
- ATT fusion-spliced.jpg (173.03 KiB) Viewed 7232 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.
EDIT 2025-02-07: An unusual edit, since DSLreports.com has been not a very stable site I've elected to preserve my last Sonic review here.
join: 2001-11-08
member for 23.2 years, 205 visits, last login: 31 days ago
updated 31 days ago
(2025-January)
Updated with the actual price. No contract terms.
Returning the eero cost $15 but it was well worth it to ensure the line worked as expected using supported equipment. We got the first 3 months free.
= OLD =
(2024-November)
We migrated away from Sonic to AT&T in August 2021 to get a better price because the FX1 service was not sufficient for our growing household. We couldn't upgrade to other FX packages and the only alternative was the 1 Gb resold AT&T package. Sonic was renegotiating with AT&T on reselling fiber packages so the FX tiers were dropped. My wife preferred going with AT&T's 300 Mbps (over-provisioned to 360 Mbps) package for less cost because we could drop telephone service.
Around February 2023 we found out Sonic was building out their network to our city so we pre-ordered. I anticipated installation would take a while due to all the posts on their Access forums at forums.sonic.net. I personally guessed over a year, maybe 1.5 years. Actual elapsed time was 1 year 9 months.
Sonic has a status page and they gave an estimate of February 2024. It got pushed a month or two until it got to December 2024. A part of the delay was described from a post where some of the fiber was installed incorrectly. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 0#p65220
It wasn't until early November 2024 that we got an email notification that our install date would be on November 10.
So as to not repeat what I wrote, I will link to my post at Sonic. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· ?t=18110.
Sonic's infrastructure hasn't changed since my parents got Sonic Fiber in 2016. They still use a separate ONT that is mechanically terminated from the drop cable to an SC-APC connector, unlike AT&T's fusion splice. The separate ONT is welcomed because I don't want an all-in-one ONT/gateway as I have my own hardware. They are deploying 10 Gb (XGS-PON) exclusively so they no longer require telephone service for subscribers.
One thing I didn't know was those who pre-ordered would get 1 or 2 (I recall 2) months' service free. But I never considered this perk.
When my wife called AT&T to cancel, they did not prorate our last month of service only stating we paid for the entire month. Sonic prorated our last month's service when we switched in 2021.
(2019-September-12)
Upgraded through Sonic's member portal to AT&T resold fiber. Three tiers are offered FX1 50 Mb, FX2 100 Mb, FX3 1000 Mb, all symmetric, no caps. AT&T has these tiers to my premises, 100 Mb, 300 Mb, 1000 Mb--the first 2 have 1 TB caps.
I chose the FX1 upgrade.
AT&T came to my home twice. The first time was after 10 days from my change order. They couldn't activate the ONT for unknown reasons. The tech had to call his support but after 1.5 hours they decided to cancel my order and create a new one with a followup visit. First visit took around 3.5 hours, 2 of them were to survey and ran a new outdoor fiber cable from a pole further down the street to another pole closest to my house then to my garage. The remaining time the tech tried to activate the ONT but didn't work. Second visit took less than an hour to just activate the ONT. The tech still couldn't do it but support was able to do so remotely. I was given a BGW210-700 RG. Since my service was 50 Mb, the RG showed the ONT port set to 100 Mb. Speed tests showed some overprovisioning. Latency is around 5 ms through IP Passthrough.
Sonic shipped me a new Grandstream HT801 ATA that's preprogrammed for my upgrade. Once the service was up, I left my old Grandstream ATA running on my VDSL Pace 5031NV RG. I asked Sonic tech support on the process and they told me the number port won't happen unless I start using the new ATA. The time between the number port was less than a day as opposed to my ADSL to VDSL upgrade's port that took 10 days.
Unlike the 5031NV RG, the BGW210-700 doesn't have DMZ+. Instead it has IP Passthrough. Functionally they are similar but the problem with IP Passthrough is people on this site state sessions are enforced by the BGW210. On the 5031NV, the sessions available actually drop to 0 but my 3rd-party firewall will still handle sessions over 1024. The BGW210 has 8K sessions. There is a bug in the BGW210: if I change the device access code authentication is disabled. I have not rebooted the RG to check if that will correct this behavior.
There was one unexpected problem with the phone number port. All my contacts on my soft phone (Accession, and Sonic Mobile Communicator) were wiped. Even the transition number's contacts were empty. Sonic is aware of the issue and should warn/auto-migrate for future subscribers.
My post on Sonic's forums: »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· &t=13495
EDIT (2015-June-02): Looks like the trouble with the modem's web server going AWOL is due to some memory leak. Sonic has indicated they've had the same experience with another Pace CPE. »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 7#p18787
EDIT (2015-May): Sonic's legacy ADSL1 tools indicated my legacy connection was being sunset and I could migrate to their Fusion FTTN product. Fusion FTTN is resold AT&T U-verse. I was one of the first customers who migrated from legacy ADSL1 to FTTN so there were a few unexpected roadblocks on Sonic's infrastructure end that delayed service completion. The service change requires a 12-month commitment followed by month-to-month commitment. Any change to the subscription (X2/bonding) will reset the commitment to 12-months+month-to-month. My migration did not let me choose pair bonding (X2), but I can change at any time. My old AT&T telephone number was ported to Sonic's VoIP. But because the process was new it took 10 business days from the time I got connected. Sonic does not want to queue up the porting process because they have no way of knowing when a subscriber would get connected. I was given a temporary VoIP number during the interim. So from the time I ordered online, I got connected after 19 days. And then 10 business days (14 calendar days) after that my phone was ported. Dane at Sonic told us the phone porting process should take 3-4 business days.
Major benefits of Sonic's Fusion FTTN legacy ADSL1 are:
1. More speed than 6 Mbps downstream. Some individuals may not be served by a VRAD but even for those situations they will get a small boost in speed because U-verse will use PTM instead of ATM, which eliminates some encapsulation overhead.
2. Phone service provided without having to subscribe to an AT&T land line.
3. No transfer caps written in the Terms of Service.
A traditional land line is beneficial however the only portion of our internet subscription's bill that has gone up is the land line from around $20 to over $30 during the past 3-4 years. What used to cost around $75/month for Sonic's ADSL1 @ 6 Mbps is now $56.19 ($40 is the base internet service, while the rest are the gateway/ATA rental and telephone fees): FTTN @ 18 Mbps, overprovisioned to 23 Mbps and all the benefits of Sonic's Fusion phone service: call waiting, forwarding, 8 hours of borderless calling, etc.
Sonic's FTTN phone is VoIP and they supply a Grandstream HT701 ATA. Softphone capability exists through Accession. The ATA is configured on Sonic's end and the device's configuration is locked out. Like all CPEs, there is a "reset configuration" button on the ATA. One must be aware that if one pushes that button, all configuration specific to the customer will be lost and one has to contact Sonic to get the configuration resynchronized.
Disadvantages to Sonic's Fusion FTTN are:
1. The phone is VoIP so if the internet is down, the phone won't work. As someone who likes to play with equipment I am not a fan of the device being locked out so I can't monitor it. Sonic's members tools page contains some settings we can change. The ATA requires a rental fee of $6.50/month.
2. The gateway is supplied by AT&T since they own the entire infrastructure, unlike in legacy ADSL1 where Sonic has more control. I am forced to rent a gateway (Pace 5031nv) for the service at $6.50/month. Like all AT&T gateways they are substandard because a lot of their features are either disabled or not available. Features like true bridge mode, SNMP monitoring, and telnet/ssh interface are not there. Since U-verse requires 802.1x authentication using the certificate embedded within the modem all subscribers need to use an approved gateway.
3. Because the entire FTTN infrastructure is owned by AT&T Fusion FTTN subscribers get an AT&T IP unlike in legacy ADSL1 where I got a Sonic IP. Sonic is planning to provide static IP addresses that are in the Sonic IP space but it will most likely come in the form of a VPN connection.
4. Speeds in Fusion FTTN are capped according to AT&T's tiered model. For those who are on Sonic's regular Fusion subscription, are close enough to the CO, and whose line cards have been upgraded to VDSL2, they get uncapped bandwidth. So if pair's maximum sync rate is over 50 Mbps, they should get close to that accounting for margin instead of the normal U-verse 25311 Kbps rate. Fusion FTTN does not have a 32 Mbps tier.
5. The gateway takes around 2 minutes to boot. My guess is most of this time is spent in recreating the device's local certificates since the web page's SSL cert changes after each reboot. My old Cayman 3546 that I used for legacy ADSL1 took less than 10 seconds to boot.
6. I monitor my modem's statistics using a script created by TestBoy »/profi ··· /1681305 that I modified. »Perl script to grab data from the NVG589. If I get the stats every 5 minutes, the gateway's web server will return 404 errors for all pages after 3.5 days. My internet connection still works and I can still ping the gateway. When I did the same for my 3546 using its telnet interface I had no such issue. More info later.
My post on Sonic's forums: »forums.sonic.net/viewtop ··· 4#p17844
Finally a shout out to the AT&T techs who did the install. They were fantastic.
EDIT (~2013/2014): System asked for an update. Sonic continues to be a great ISP. While our underlying AT&T service has seen price increases, our Sonic ADSL1 service has remained steady. Service has been very stable. I can't create another review for Sonic, but my parents' service from Sonic.net is also working well. They have seen service features added such as free calls to all 50 states, free calls to most-called country per continent, free static IP with no additional increase in monthly payment. My in-laws have seen their U-verse go from a promotional $50/month to $70 for 1.5Mbps service.
EDIT (2011): got the go-live date incorrect. I couldn't update the stats in my original post but around 2 weeks ago, I noticed a phone cord that was not connected to a phone had the DSL filter at its tail end. The telephone cord was connected to the wall, followed by the filter.
Moving the filter to the wall first caused the modem's noise margin to improve from 13-14 dB to 17-18 dB. Don't know what I was thinking when I connected the filter--most likely laziness in my part was a big factor.
(2011) I switched from 6Mbps AT&T legacy ADSL1 service after being served by them for around 10 years because of its transfer cap policy. Having seen Dane's interview at Triangulation »twit.tv/tri5 I decided to give them a try. It's unfortunate I couldn't get Fusion since I'm served off a remote terminal. Sonic also resells AT&T's legacy ADSL1 services but requires that I remain an AT&T phone customer. This is the route I took. Since I just switched ADSL1 providers, the turnaround was ~3 days--I was told 3-5 days--instead of the 5-14 for Fusion. The longer forecast is for people who have AT&T U-verse and a new wire needs to be pulled to a customer's home. The actual go live date was a Monday morning.
Sonic's CPE use ATM bridged encapsulation instead of PPPoE so my Netopia 3546-002 continues to work with the same VPI/VCI numbers with the required change in encapsulation. I was confused by a modem's network bridge mode vs. ATM bridged encapsulation but the people in the Sonic.net forum set me straight.
They offer a modem with rebate for the cost of the device if you sign up for 12 months. The rebate does not include shipping charge. I found that attractive and if things work out, I will give the modem to my parents as I migrate them away from AT&T as they qualify for Sonic Fusion. Sonic currently has a 12-month commitment discount of $20/month over the regular price of $39.95/month for 6Mbps. The monthly cost I entered does not include this discount but includes my AT&T telco portion--and is essentially the same price as my old AT&T package. If I could get Fusion, my cost would have dropped to around $50.
Sonic offers some free services to their ISP customers. Their webpage describes them in detail but the one I thought was valuable is FAX send and receive capability--which I've used several times already. An interesting retro service is shell access but you need to register first as I was not able to login. You're also given free web space with some quota but I have not provisioned the service either. Finally, a nice touch is they provide a Cisco VPN client for their VPN gateways.
A caveat for people considering going to Sonic from AT&T ADSL1 to Sonic ADSL1 is you need to let Sonic know your current speed so you can carry that over. Some people have had AT&T's 6Mbps package but got bumped down to 3Mbps after the switch over and AT&T would not re-provision the line at 6Mbps.
»Cayman 3546-002 w/ Sonic.net documents my transition.
