Things I Have Been Noticing About Sonic

[lawsj]

Hello everyone,

This is the first, and possibly the last, time I have posted in a Sonic forum. I have been with Sonic for several years now and something happened just now that makes me want to post the changes I have been seeing with Sonic.

I came to Sonic after a very bad encounter with AT&T. Even typing the name At&T makes me upset. That's how angry they made me. Let me tell you my story about AT&T.

I had ADSL 6.0 from them and phone service. I was far from the DSLAM so my connection was stable, but would have "burps" on occasion. I phoned their tech support about it many times and I would get the verbal "script" every time and it would just annoy the shit out of me. I would wait up to 1.5 hours to get an "alleged" tech on the phone only to have them go through the "script" for another ten minutes.

Anyway, I decided to change my speed to 3.0 and phoned them to have them do that. Because I was having a technician come to the house the next day, the customer service rep said to wait and not change it until the tech examined the wires in the house. That made sense, and I agreed to that.

The next day, I logged on my computer and noticed things were slow. I checked and they changed my speed to 3.0! I phoned AT&T and told them my situation expecting that they would put me back where it was before since it was their mistake. Of course they were willing to put me back to the 6.0 speed, BUT they said I would have to pay the new price for 6.0!!! I was furious. So because THEY screwed up, I have to pay the price?

Now the phone situation. At the time, I was living with two roommates. We all had a separate line but it went to the same Box in the basement. We all had IDENTICAL phone plans. I know this because we showed each others bills when this issue I am about to explain came up. I was charged a $5 non-usage fee each month for not using long distance, but the other two roommates were not charged! We went over the bills for the last 6 months and no one made any long distance calls, yet they were NOT charged the $5 fee!!!!!

Remember, same plan, same usage, same box, same house, same neighborhood, same country, same planet, same solar system, same galaxy. Yet, I got a $5 charge. I never asked AT&T about it, because they could have just said that they forgot to charge the other roommates and then they get the $5 charge.

That was when I started looking for another ADSL and phone service.

Now, today with Sonic.

When I first started with Sonic, I loved it. The tech support was wonderful! No scripts, no tiers, I can ask for anything to be done and, if it's reasonable, they would do it. Warm friendly people who explain things and made me feel respected. They even would do a RIP and rebuild which AT&T would never do unless I practically begged them and I was right, it fixed the line.

The wait time I used to get from Sonic tech support was about 30 seconds. Yes, 30 seconds. Today it was 30 minutes. Now, I understand that, and I am not complaining about it, just noticing it.

The person I spoke with today, was not very helpful at all. I made a list of things I would like to have done as I am experiencing issues with the line since I got Sonic's Pace 4111N router, but he had a unemotional robotic manner about him that made me feel very uncomfortable. It was like, I was annoying him.

Long story short about this encounter, I told him that I was experiencing a delay of about 2 to 3 seconds when I would connect to websites. I said that it might be my computer, but I already uninstalled everything. When I say everything, I mean I removed Office, All the drivers, all the IE even unchecking the native IE that comes with windows so there is no browser at all and of course all addons. Basically, I made it like I wiped the hard drive and installed Windows fresh. Then, I tried piece by piece to rebuild it back checking the response time for the web with each installation and the delay was still about 2-3 seconds.

I told the tech guy all this and he basically ignored it. I asked about a RIP and rebuild and he said no. Its back to when AT&T used to imply that the problem is ALWAYS with me and never with the ISP. He did not want to test the line saying that if I'm connecting, then the line is fine (yeah, except for the 2-3 second delay right?)

In any event, he basically did nothing and my issue is still there. I am A+ certified and worked in the industry for years so I'm not an idiot. What I am going to do is change the NIC card, I will wipe my hard drive and low-level format it (write zeros to each sector), then reinstall Windows 7 Pro Sp1, and I bet you my life that the issue will still be there.

Sonic is turning into AT&T slow but sure.

[Tom Lee]

For the first part on the $5.00 monthly fee, which long distance carrier did you guys have because unless you specifically tell them you do not want long distance, they will charge you a monthly fee as you will be on some long distance plan with a monthly fee as I ran into that situation before and just told them I didn't want any long distance since it was cheaper to use 10xxx or buy a prepaid phone card or just use the cell phone if I wanted long distance. That was before Google Voice came along which made all calls to the US and Canada free.

I do agree with you about the second part as well as it seems the techs are not as knowledgeable as before and basically doesn't know how their servers for fusion vs AT&T DSL is setup.

[Guest]

For the first part on the $5.00 monthly fee, which long distance carrier did you guys have because unless you specifically tell them you do not want long distance, they will charge you a monthly fee as you will be on some long distance plan with a monthly fee as I ran into that situation before and just told them I didn't want any long distance since it was cheaper to use 10xxx or buy a prepaid phone card or just use the cell phone if I wanted long distance. That was before Google Voice came along which made all calls to the US and Canada free.

I do agree with you about the second part as well as it seems the techs are not as knowledgeable as before and basically doesn't know how their servers for fusion vs AT&T DSL is setup.

We all had the exact same plan and no one made any long-distance calls in the last 6 months. They showed me their plan and their bills wondering if they were going to be charged as well. So why is AT&T charging me $5 and not them? I'll tell you why, AT&T is doing illegal things, but I have no real proof because they could just say it was a mistake. Note: I also thought it was a mistake, but it happened two months in a row will only me being charged and not the two roommates. Oh and this was all wired phone not cell phone all to the same box in the basement.

[thulsa_doom]

I took a look into this circuit, and it looks quite healthy from this end. A quick 100 pings with large packets (1500 bytes), for example, looks good:

Code: Select all

$ ping -s 1500 -c 100 75.XXX.XXX.XXX
<snip />
--- 75.XXX.XXX.XXX ping statistics ---
100 packets transmitted, 100 received, 0% packet loss, time 99006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 40.855/41.679/44.041/0.515 ms

I'm unclear on whether this slow turn-around time on webpages is affecting all sites or a specific subset of them. If you pull up your browser's developer tools, what does it say the hangup is? The following is my workstation's browser pulling up the Sonic.net forums, and does a pretty good job of breaking down where any pauses or long downloads are happening:

forums.sonic.net.pageload.png (156.4 KiB) Viewed 7916 times

A traceroute to and from an affected web server may also be useful in hunting down where the actual problem lies (on the computer, on the LAN, on the Fusion connection itself, within our network, on one of our peers, at the web server itself, what-have-you). That the problem started after introducing the Pace unit is a pretty strong indication that swapping out that combo unit is probably a good step.

[Guest]

Already ahead of you. I phoned tech support again and they are replacing the Pace Router since the router doesn't sync up with the time server no matter what I or support does. The time is all over the place, so might be a defective router. *crosses fingers* :)

[Tom Lee]

We all had the exact same plan and no one made any long-distance calls in the last 6 months. They showed me their plan and their bills wondering if they were going to be charged as well. So why is AT&T charging me $5 and not them? I'll tell you why, AT&T is doing illegal things, but I have no real proof because they could just say it was a mistake. Note: I also thought it was a mistake, but it happened two months in a row will only me being charged and not the two roommates. Oh and this was all wired phone not cell phone all to the same box in the basement.

What year did this happen? I know atleast 2009 and earlier, having a long distance company used to be free after one is given a choice to use anything other than AT&T in 1986 and later. However, long distance carriers started added monthly fees just to have long distance regardless if you use long distance or not and unless you specifically tell them you do not want a long distance carrier, they will assign you one by default and you will get charged with a monthly fee, what was the exact name of the charge? Also, the bill specifically mentions who is the long distance carrier you have provided.

The AT&T we are dealing with today is not the AT&T we all know as the long distance carrier as basically, SBC which is Southwestern Bell Communications after buying a majority of the Regional Bell Operating Companies or Baby Bells from Pacific Bell, Neveda Bell, BellSouth, Ameritech, SNET. Local phone service is provided by AT&T California while long distance is with AT&T.

AT&T in 2011 started charging people $2 a month or adding to make the balance $2 if under $2 of long distance calls were made for people who don't make or makes less then $2 of long distance calls at 39 cents a minute as shown here:
http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/busines ... s_wit.html

[Tom Lee]

Wanted to say the AT&T we are dealing with today is actually SBC after they bought AT&T Corp and renamed themselves to AT&T.

[nsmill49]

While it is true that the "new" AT&T is the old SBC rebranded, the old SBC was "SBC Global Communications", a rebranding of Southwestern Bell Telephone (SWBT). And Nevada Bell and Pacific Bell were different units of "The Pacific Telesis Group"; having the same relationship as Illinois Bell, Indiana Bell, Michigan Bell, Ohio Bell, and Wisconsin Bell to Ameritech.

[Tom Lee]

Pacific Telesis Group became AirTouch Communications which later merged with Vodafone to become Vodafone Airtouch. SBC actually stands for Southwestern Bell Corporation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T

Southwestern Bell changed its name to SBC Communications Inc. in 1995.

There was never a SBC Global Communications as SBC Communications Inc adopted the AT&T Inc. in 2005.

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=7368

There was a AT&T Global Network Services which was IBM Global Network Services, the largest internet backbone in the world after it was bought by AT&T. Not to be confused with AT&T WorldNet (ip.att.net) which is the backbone built for AT&T by BBNPlanet that used InternetMCI for transit or AT&T Emerging Network Services (attens.com) which was CERFNet (California Educational Research Foundation Network) - one of the NSF funded research networks based at the San Diego SuperComputing Center at UC San Diego run by General Atomics after AT&T bought it.

[Tom Lee]

There was something known as SBC Global which is their Internet side...

SBCglobal.net is the product of the merger between SBC and Yahoo!, giving SBC users access to all parts of yahoo.com. SBCglobal comes with SBC Internet, which is one of the most popular service providers in the country.

History

SBC and Yahoo! merged in 2003, creating SBC Yahoo!. This merger provided users with SBC Internet service, including SBCglobal users, with access to all services that Yahoo! offers their members, such as Yahoo! email, chat rooms and instant messenger.