Sonic.net Blogs

Easy way to save $5 on Internet

Here’s a quick and easy way to save on your Internet access: let Sonic.net help with your Verizon wireless service.  Pairing Sonic.net’s customer service with Verizon’s great network coverage is an unbeatable combination.

To make it even better, you can save $5/mo for a full year when you get both from Sonic.net!

We can provide most standard phones, as well as smartphone products like the Blackberry. Being able to get technical support from one organization for your Internet, email, and smartphone integration with email can also mean a lot less customer service frustration.

For details, start on the Sonic.net Verizon Smartphone page, but if you’re interested in any specific phone, or simply want to re-up your current plan to save, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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DSL Aggregation Router Reload

This Tuesday, October 20 at 12:01 AM we will be performing maintenance reloads of three Redbacks that terminate traditional DSL service. This will affect all Los Angeles DSL subscribers, and some of our Bay Area DSL subscribers. Expected downtime is 5 minutes.

-Jared

Update: The maintenance reloads have been completed without incident. Downtime for affected customers was under 5 minutes.

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Sonic.net DirecTV DoublePlay feature

Just in time for football season.  There’s a cool new feature available on the Sonic.net DirecTV service: DoublePlay. This lets you swap back and forth between two shows, without losing your paused position.

All Sonic.net DirecTV HD DVRs and R22 models are now enabled with the feature. Customers can now watch, pause, fast-forward and rewind two shows airing at the same time and not miss a thing!

1. Go to the first channel you wish to watch and press the DOWN arrow on your remote
2. The following message appears “Press DOWN again to start DoublePlay™”. Press DOWN again
3. Once you start DoublePlay™, your receiver begins storing up to 90 minutes on both channels
4. Press the DOWN button to switch between channels
5. Press the record key on a program currently being viewed to save a copy in your Playlist

See the Sonic.net DirecTV web page for more product information.

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Sonic.net DirecTV DoublePlay feature

Just in time for football season.  There’s a cool new feature available on the Sonic.net DirecTV service: DoublePlay. This lets you swap back and forth between two shows, without losing your paused position.

All Sonic.net DirecTV HD DVRs and R22 models are now enabled with the feature. Customers can now watch, pause, fast-forward and rewind two shows airing at the same time and not miss a thing!

1. Go to the first channel you wish to watch and press the DOWN arrow on your remote
2. The following message appears “Press DOWN again to start DoublePlay™”. Press DOWN again
3. Once you start DoublePlay™, your receiver begins storing up to 90 minutes on both channels
4. Press the DOWN button to switch between channels
5. Press the record key on a program currently being viewed to save a copy in your Playlist

See the Sonic.net DirecTV web page for more product information.

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PHP5 upgrade

We have upgraded PHP5 on our webcluster to version 5.3.0. If you experience any issues with this new version please let us know.
-William

Updated: Due do some unexpected incompatibility issues we’ve rolled back to the previous version of PHP5.  We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.  -William and Kelsey

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Free Internet for a year contest!

For the next fifteen days we will be running a contest on Twitter where we will give away free Internet service for a year!

We will give away one year of free Internet service (traditional AT&T line shared DSL as fast as we can, or Fusion at up to 30mbps, CA only) every day for 15 days to celebrate our 15th anniversary.

The contest will be run over Twitter, entrants have to use the hashtag #sonicnet .

One entry will be chosen at random every day for fifteen days from the mentions of #sonicnet during the past day.  Each mention is an entry, but please don’t over-tweet, spammers won’t be winners.

One win per person, win is transferable if you’re in an area we do not serve (you are welcome to give it away or sell it).

Winners’ Circle

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Cotati, Sonoma Fusion/FlexLink availability

We have deployed equipment in two new central offices on our new technology platform. Both Fusion and FlexLink products are now available to customers served by the Cotati and Sonoma central offices.

Cotati and Sonoma were left out in the initial wave of deployment last year because both are awkwardly situated with relationship to many of the customers in the serving area. For example the Sonoma central office is actually in Agua Caliente, and this limits the availability of Fusion services for many Sonoma residents. (Agua Caliente residents on the other hand are very well situated.)

That said, for our business clients, broad FlexLink availability is important, so it’s nice to have wrapped these two locations up. Many wineries in the Sonoma area for example have previously had only expensive T1 or wireless options available, and can now take advantage of the speeds and low prices of FlexLink symmetric products.

These two offices complete our near term Sonoma County coverage, and we are now focusing construction efforts in Marin, Napa and the East Bay.

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Planned infrastructure maintenance.

Update (0243 16, Oct.) : Maintenance finished; customers shouldn’t have noticed much if any down time. – Augie and Kelsey.

This Thursday (15, Oct.) we will be performing maintenance on some of the internal networking and NetApp storage filers that many of our servers depend on (including e-mail and web); from 11pm to 1am the following morning you may see a slow down in performance when retrieving or sending e-mail or accessing your web content as we perform our maintenance.

-Augie, Aaron, Don, and Kelsey.Update :

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Pogowave finishes network address translation migration

Today is the day that the wireless department will turn off network address translation on our last Pogowave station; The Golden Apple Ranch on Fitzpatrick Lane.

This is our largest and most diverse station, featuring three low band access points.

We think that this can be performed in less than 30 minutes of down time.  Thank you for your patience during this transition that will allow for improved customer support for all Sonic.net Pogowave customers.

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DSL DHCP Server Issues

Early this morning four of our DHCP servers started having issues responding quickly to DCHP requests.  These simultaneous failures overwhelmed our ability to migrate load to our hot-standby servers but we were able to put several work-arounds in place to mitigate the issues.  These failures were initially believed to be consistent with disk pre-failure scenarios where a single disk’s performance is impacted and the RAID system has yet to fail the disk.  However, upon further investigation it was revealed that these failures were triggered by scheduled SMART tests.  Ironically, the SMART tests were recently enabled to help us detect and replace failing disks before their failure triggered a service impacting event.

At this time, all DHCP services have been returned to normal.

-Nathan, Don, and Kelsey

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