Why do I pay 39.99 for average download 2.35 MBPS

[goldinlarsen]

Thats the best the tech rep said I can get in my area.??? The ad on SONICS website indicates speeds up to 20MBPS, that would be great if even on occasion I get up to 10, but I never get past 2.8MBPS. Does that seem fair. So I am paying %100 of cost for only ever getting the privilege of getting %10 of service.

If you went to McDonalds and ordered a fries for 2.99 and they hand you 2 fries and say thats all we can do right now; because the fryer is 4 feet to far from the counter, WOULD YOU BE HAPPY? This is how sonic thinks.

Here is another example in case the McDonalds one isn't clear. You go to 7-11 and buy 20 bags of chips, you pay $20, they only let you take two bags of chips with you, this is SONIC; and you are supposed to smile and accept it, because you're helping SONIC/7-11??? ABSURD, RIGHT?

I am currently getting 20MBPS from cable for the same price. And then whenever I log on to Sonic, I find they have clamped my line down to .8MBPS and I have to call service desk. Is there a direct line so I can just have them unclamp my line whenever I want to get emails on my computer. Not a very good service after all.

I have to upload files to a server from work, and for a two gig file, It can take up to 8 hours using sonic, which is pretty absurd, service just not worth it.

Its easier to check email on my phone and then tether that to my computer. It's too bad, was really hoping Sonic would be better that that. One want to get away from the big companies but there is no incentive to help out the smaller companies.

When I asked the tech rep if there was a way to communicate with someone about this, he said forums was the only place to do this. This is pretty shabby customer service - in fact the worse. All I want is to get emails in less than 5minutes and watch an occasional netflix without it slowing down or being extremely pixelated. If the service was $20 I wouldn't feel so bad, but for the same price I pay for cable modem, it doesn't make sense

So if anybody even reads these "customer issues", I am sorry things are so terrible

[fawnandmike]

"Up to" includes everything from Zero to 20mbps. If you don't understand how DSL works, you don't really get to complain about it.

[thulsa_doom]

The business model for Fusion Broadband + Phone revolves around the notion of not placing any artificial restrictions on the customer's service. We don't hold new phone features hostage so we can nickle & dime you to death. We don't cap data usage on this product. We don't hold broadband speeds hostage to some contrived speed tier system on this product. This means that if somebody 11,000 feet out from a central office can get 3mbps we charge forty bucks a month to get it to them. If they're 2,000 feet out from the central office and can get 22mbps we charge the same. There's no significant difference in the cost to deliver the circuit (we don't pay extra to get shorter loops), so why charge the short-loop-length customer more? Just to squeeze a bunch of extra money out? That's some other company's model, not ours.

When you buy 20 bags of chips from the 7/11 they need to restock 20 bags of chips, so it costs more than just two bags. Broadband doesn't work like that. We get you as much speed as your location allows us to, whatever speed that may be. You're paying a 20 bag price, but can't actually pull all 20 through your connection. We happen to have an aggressively-good 20 bag price, so that works for most people.

[oddhack]

Unfortunately the business model is breaking down in the face of absolutely zero reason to believe there will be meaningful performance improvements for many customers. I get the technical issues and I can imagine slightly the pain of dealing with lots of municipalities trying to roll fiber, much less the economic issues of trying to build out an entire network.

But the reality is that Sonic is losing customers and will lose them faster and faster until you have a speedwise competitive product in place. A friend who moved to Sonic at my recommendation is moving away from it after 6 months because she can't get more than 2.5 Mbps at her location and Comcast, while evil, will at least let her and her housemate both run Netflix. I ask myself every month how much Sonic's pro-customer attitude makes up for the fact that my delivered performance is 4x lower than evil telecom giants provide at similar prices. Etc.

I feel like this is being dealt with much like the modem rental fee - you may sort of intellectually grasp how customers feel about the issue, but you don't really *get* it. So we've kept hearing about testbed fiber projects here and there or minor DSL speed improvements that might help customers very close to COs - but nothing actually relevant to our own situations. It is unfortunate.

[cdkeen]

So we've kept hearing about testbed fiber projects here and there or minor DSL speed improvements that might help customers very close to COs - but nothing actually relevant to our own situations. It is unfortunate.

Smaller telecom/cable providers deploying fiber to the home creates an incentive for larger incumbent providers like AT&T / Comcast / Verizon to build services that can compete on the same level. "The only time large companies like AT&T move towards fiber to the home service is when a competitor threatens to do it themselves. That is precisely what happened in Austin. The day Google announced it was launching fiber service in Austin, AT&T suddenly announced its intention to do the same." -http://stopthecap.com/2014/04/01/math-p ... e-service/

This is very relevant to your situation, but unfortunately the tangible benefits will necessarily take longer to appear, as it is in the interest of the incumbents to essentially do nothing to upgrade, because the price isn't worth the amount of revenue returns the companies can expect in the short-term.