Sonic.net

I'm new to Sonic. I moved to a new area, and used to have Comcast cable, which was blazing fast in my old house.

I figured Sonic would be better, given the glowing reviews. But so far it feels much slower. I'm not sure if it's usual or not, and I'm hoping people can give me an idea of what benchmark I should be looking for.

For the last few days I've been showing (through the Ookla test), latency between 600ms-950ms, download speed of between 2.5mbps and 3mbps, and upload speeds of between 0.1mbps and 0.3mbps. Is that normal? The latency seems high and the upload speeds seem low.

Is there a good way to troubleshoot what's going on? I'm very ignorant when it comes to these things. I have the Fusion FTTN package.

Thank you so much.

Hello Brendan,

Unfortunately we don't have a lot of visibility into FTTN circuits, for example we don't have historical bandwidth usage graphs or even an IP to ping. Usually the best way to troubleshoot connectivity issues on FTTN is in real time on the phone.

However, given the information you've provided (thanks for that!) I would guess that you are saturating your line, most likely with an upload. Saturating the line just means using 100% or near 100% of your available bandwidth. The most common culprits of upload activity are phones and tablets syncing with the cloud. Do you know of anything that might be using your upload bandwidth?

Thank you for the response, Andrew. I will try to call customer support to do it live on the phone.

I have been syncing my Box account at night when I'm offline, but I stop it when I'm awake. Does my bandwidth get throttled down if I'm using a lot of upload? Even after I've stopped using it? Could that be the issue?

No, your bandwidth won't get throttled. However, while you are syncing with your Box account the internet will be sluggish unless you set a bandwidth limit on how much of the available upload bandwidth that Box has access to (something like 70% of available bandwidth should be good).

Essentially you need both upload and download bandwidth to utilize the internet, and if a single device or program is hogging all the upload bandwidth it causes slow downs on all other devices. But your speeds should go back to normal (and your latency drop from 800ms to around 30ms) once you pause your upload activity.

Customer Support is available everyday 8am to 10pm at 888.766.4233. So if you have a few minutes give us a call so we can track down what is causing your issue. I am guessing it's line saturation but there could be another problem impacting your connection.

Are you on wifi? I've had horrendous pings and over 50% dropped packets (which translates to slower speeds) on 2.4GHz in crowded urban areas.

brendanmcguigan wrote:I'm new to Sonic. I moved to a new area, and used to have Comcast cable, which was blazing fast in my old house.

I figured Sonic would be better, given the glowing reviews. But so far it feels much slower. I'm not sure if it's usual or not, and I'm hoping people can give me an idea of what benchmark I should be looking for.

For the last few days I've been showing (through the Ookla test), latency between 600ms-950ms, download speed of between 2.5mbps and 3mbps, and upload speeds of between 0.1mbps and 0.3mbps. Is that normal? The latency seems high and the upload speeds seem low.

Is there a good way to troubleshoot what's going on? I'm very ignorant when it comes to these things. I have the Fusion FTTN package.

Thank you so much.

Holy jesus that is a ping of death ( your MS is ridiculously high which can suggest one of two things - your line saturation is super high or you have faults on your line somewhere , there could be potential other issues but those are usually main culprits ) ... and your download / upload speeds are atrocious you should be seeing something around 25 mbps down and 1-2 up if you live close to the VRAD box ... if you live a little further you might notice a speed decrease but it should not be this significant ...

Response to member who thinks Sonic should be giving users 25Mbps down:

We've used Sonic for the past 15 years for a home business and family uses. There is no question that today's up and down rates have declined in this period. Two years ago we were guaranteed 1MB/sec upload. A few moments ago it was 0.7 MB/sec and fluctuating down to 0.5MBPS. The staff at Sonic tells me now that that they can't guarantee 1.0MBPS because somehow our area has declined in user throughput and that the real problem is with another provider who carries Sonic service on its own fiber system and refuses to upgrade its system. Such is Life!

FWIW, I am on Sonic Fusion(DSL) and easily/consistently get 40Mbit+.

Everything mentioned sounds like something is going pretty wrong. I would start by unplugging everything in the house, connect your computer by wire to the router and test the speed that way. It will reduce chances of it being something on your network. If you are new to the area and live in an older house, chances are your WiFi will suck(mesh routers solve that). These 100 year old houses literally have walls full of metal, so it's basically a faraday cage..
The other thing this will address is a possibility of a device on your network misbehaving. For example, I have a Tivo mini box that has a weird tendency to, every couple of months of locking up the entire network. It's a fascinating bug, When it hits, everything on the network is dog slow. One I isolated that device, the headach went away

brendanmcguigan wrote:For the last few days I've been showing (through the Ookla test), latency between 600ms-950ms, download speed of between 2.5mbps and 3mbps, and upload speeds of between 0.1mbps and 0.3mbps. Is that normal? The latency seems high and the upload speeds seem low.

Long story short I was on FTTN for years without issue but eventually ended up running into the same problem. Sonic gave me the line about saturating my upload but the only consistent upload was a Nest doorbell (~150Kbps).

I suspect it may have been due to a firmware upgrade on the Pace 5268 since pfSense graphs showed it started shortly after midnight one day and indeed ATT had pushed a new firmware. In the end I reluctantly switched to Comcast using my same equipment (minus the 5268 obviously) and the issue was resolved.

Sonic has great customer service but when it comes to FTTN they're obviously limited in their support. Hopefully Sonic fiber is available someday at this location but until then Comcast has been rock solid at almost half the price of FTTNx2.

Best of luck.

Oh, if this is resold AT&T stuff, all bets are off.. There is only so much control Sonic would have. They had Sonic sold AT&T fiber in our area for years, I never even considered, waited for the real deal on my DSL ;-D