Next steps in growth
March 3, 2009 – 10:58 am
On our new FlexLink & Fusion product platform, we have completed build out of 19 COs in this LATA, and number twenty, Sacramento, is still pending some backhaul to this LATA.
Sales are going well, both in enterprise and residential. This is particularly interesting considering that a key product for both is voice. We are unable to make quite a number of business sales because they want an integrated voice and data product, and we are unable to make a lot of residential sales because they want POTS voice.
Notable also is that batch hot cut (where the existing AT&T voice pair is moved from them to us, meaning the household/office wiring doesn’t have to be re-done) and LNP (local number port) have the potential to really ease installation of residential products, bringing us true self-install for residential. We’re doing our first attempt at BHC now for a customer in Berkeley.
In total, we are serving over 200 total accounts on the platform today, and that’s growing quickly, even absent significant promotion for residential (which we can really get into once we have BHC/LNP as noted above.)
We’ve been paused on building new COs for a couple months now, and it’s time to get that pipeline moving again. Because it takes in total almost six months from order to turn-up, making those decisions now is key.
In the ideal, if we can continue to prove the business model, I’d like to see us turning up an average of two new COs per month.
So based upon this goal, we have been studying next CO opportunities. The decisions are based upon a number of data points. These include current coverage (filling in holes and creating continuous overlays), brand awareness, existing current DSL user counts, density and distances, RT vs. CO served footprint, estimation of the size of the symmetric & voice business market, drive time for installation, and plain guesswork.
This list of six CO choices allows us to get the ball rolling, and with the one per two week goal, it buys us three months before we must decide on what’s next after these.
So, first up:
Cotati, which has long loops and not a ton of residential opportunity, but it completes our Sonoma County 101 corridor coverage, and provides some great opportunity for T1 and other long reach products in the Northern business parks of Petaluma.
Sonoma and Napa. Both have reasonable residential loop lengths, are close to home, and we have decent brand recognition (in Sonoma at least.) Both have some great opportunities for T1 and voice for wineries, and I believe that this along with the residential opportunity will make them cash flow.
These three will be built first, and there is some synergy with the driving for build-out and for installations. Stop at Sonoma on the way to Napa, etc.
Next up are San Rafael and Oakland. San Rafael has two COs, but the main downtown one is the one we can more clearly justify build-out in. It’s got good residential and business penetration, and it’s on the 101, so there’s some benefits for installers and build-out.
Oakland has four COs, but we’ll be building the Northern two of them. These serve far more existing residential users, and the downtown business district. These two also directly connect to Berkeley and that to Albany, so it creates a large single coverage block for us. That’s
good for installations and sales, keeping drive time down.
These six COs will be kicked off this week, and we will begin planning for the hardware and build-out.
After these, the choices become a bit more difficult. For example, Mountain View is the next logical one based upon our current DSL users, but it’s a long drive and we don’t have a lot of brand awareness. San Jose is a good business customer opportunity, but there are four COs
meaning high build-out costs, and it’s got a lot of competitive options we’d have to face. We’ll cross these bridges when we come to them, in a couple months, with more information about the profitability of our current COs to inform us.
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44 Responses to “Next steps in growth”
Hi there,
How many would it take to get you to consider the South Bay? You have plenty of brand awareness down here, trust me. I can email you a list of customers who would love to upgrade to Fusion DSL in the area if offered.
Thanks!
Erica
By Erica Joy Baker on Mar 3, 2009
I’ve been considering the feasibility of a sort of social network site that would allow customers to commit, and we’d build once a site had enough commitments to justify it. Imagine a site, perhaps using the Facebook Connect API for authentication and sharing, which would let you determine how far along in commitments a CO was.
About 250 customers per CO is the starting point. One challenge today is that these need to be CO served, not RT (remote terminal.)
At this time, we don’t have the internal resources to build a site that would allow for this type of grass roots neighborhood effort. Perhaps we can provide access to our loop qualification data and they can build the site. (hint)
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Mar 3, 2009
Ha, hint well taken Dane. Let me see if I can rustle up some people with some free time.
-Erica
By Erica Joy Baker on Mar 3, 2009
Dane, we’d love to see some Fusion love down in PCFCCA11, but the equipment in there is apparently pretty old/incapable. Is there any hope? Thanks.
By Grego on Mar 3, 2009
Greco,
I wouldn’t be too optimistic. The size of the community is probably too small – we really need 250 customers or so in a pretty tight geographic area to justify construction.
This is the drive behind the idea of a social network for build-out. “Bring us Broadband”, we could call it. Find your CO, find out your wire distance, and see what products would be available. View how many others have committed, and how many total would be needed to kick off construction. Then, follow the course of construction for that CO as it’s built with regular updates.
If only doing it was as easy as describing it.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Mar 3, 2009
Sign me up for any South Bay effort, please. I’m on FB as well.
By Bob Kenyon on Mar 3, 2009
Thanks for rolling out in Berkeley. I’m thrilled with my 10Mbps/1Mbps Fusion!
-G
By Graham Freeman on Mar 3, 2009
I posted this under another topic, but this is closer related(sorry for the duplicate). So before I get flamed, I will post it here and ask for forgiveness!
I talked to Sales about Fusion and they said I was about 2000 feet out of range and AT&T did not have any services in the nearest RT. I get 1.5/384 now but I am stuck in this “dead zone” where that is my option.
I know you are usually in the know about what is coming down the pipe from AT&T and I understand that I am stuck in the middle, litterally, of where AT&T is retrofiting their network. Might you have any inside knowledge when higher speeds will be available in the 2000ft plus range?
Thanks for being my ISP for the past 13 years! The service and professionalisim I get from SONoma county InterConnect (SONIC.NET) is awesome. I look forward to seeing your thoughts.
By Kevin Sullivan on Mar 5, 2009
Put me down for the Southbay too!
By Henry on Mar 6, 2009
Glad to hear that the Fusion build-out is going well, and that you’re satisfied with customer adoption rates. I’m in Fremont (FRMTCA11) and have no idea how many sonic.net customers you have at that CO, but I for one would sign up for Fusion in a heartbeat.
If you get the social networking/demand generation tool up, I’ll beat the bushes in my neighborhood on Sonic’s behalf.
By Greg Thomas on Mar 10, 2009
Hey Dane,
I’m more than excited to see all of this wireless technology come to Sonoma county, I’ve just suggested to my boss that we order wireless from Sonic to supplement our bandwidth at work.
I’m just curious, I’m Phusion on twitter and I know my nickname bares a resemblance to your wireless service, but why are you following me? Not that I mind, but I’m just a lowly tech support geek and I was curious as to why I was added shortly after stepping out of the SR office from an (epic fail) interview.
By Tim Gravenites on Mar 11, 2009
I hope you guys come to Stockton to support dry loop dsl. I can’t justify the AT&T POTS tax to get a good ISP with a static IP. The lady I talked to was nice to let me know. Just… sucks.. LOL. AT&T wants $75 for 3mb down & 5 static ips. Too much. Stockton’s tech savy needs you! -Brad
By Bradley Winter on Mar 19, 2009
FYI
Today (Mon 8:00 am) I had a sync- no surf outage that after a lot of coaxing on my part resulted in you innitiating a trouble ticket with ATT. I was told that att reported a bad card in my local dslam. I douubt this was true since there were not other sonic customers reporting problems (90 circuits served by the card). The circuit was restored around 11:30 and remained up for only about 1 hr 30 min. When I called you back, I was told that att found no further trouble and that my only option was to have someone come out on Thursday. I have been thru all this before many times. After more pleading with your tech support my (chronic) problem was upgraded by you to a trouble report to ATT NOC. Service was restored around 8:30 this evening.
I am telling you all this because this has happened several times before, always with the same result. I am tired of rebooting and replacing modems and rebooting routers and all the level 1 stuff that I have to go thru with you before I can get you to get ATT to fix this chronic problem. In ten years with sonic it has never once been a problem at my end.
I want to know what went wrong at ATT. What specifically did they do at NOC to fix it? Do they even know?
Would they even give you an honest answer? Mostly, I need to know that the next time this happens that there will be an efficient method of dealing with the problem that does not waste a lot of my time with useless preliminaries.
I have been a Sonic customer and supporter for a long time. Over the years I have converted many of my customers from ATT to sonic. I have done this primarily because of the quality of your customer support. I no longer able to spend the time and effort I suffered today to get service restored. Internet service is mission critical to my work with the county.
I don’t expect perpetual uninterupted service. I do need reasonable answers.
By Richard Klein on Apr 6, 2009
I’ve forwarded your comments to senior support staff for review. The blog isn’t a channel for support; I’ve routed your note over to support, but otherwise they would not have seen it.
You shouldn’t need to coax us to open an AT&T trouble ticket – that’s easy, and pretty routine.
FYI, a single card in an AT&T DSLAM typically serves four user circuits. Some of the newer ones in COs serve eight.
On the other side, I don’t think we’re likely to have any success getting AT&T to give us a coherent answer about what they fixed. Typically they simply say “fixed”, not “X was broken”. Sorry!
This posting was off the topic of the article it’s posted with, so I’ll bring it on topic by saying that these sort of challenges are one of the reasons we have now built own new network. You might consider switching to the new Fusion Broadband product if it’s available in your area.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Apr 7, 2009
Alameda Island seems a little out of reach of your Oakland COs. I’d love to get off of Comcast, though. Does Alameda show up anywhere in your thoughts?
Joe
By Joe Killian on Apr 12, 2009
Alameda is an interesting market, and it’s certainly an area we’ll keep on our radar. It would make some sense because it’s adjacent to other markets we will be serving (Oakland), creating a continuous coverage area. It’s also within range of our installation and repair folks.
The argument against it would probably be the lack of businesses. In many markets, finding 20-30 business customers (T1 or bigger) helps justify the deployment. In a primarily residential area, we need to find a lot more residential customers in order to reach break even.
FYI, here’s an image link that shows what coverage might look like if we did deploy there. The green and yellow areas would be Fusion DSL and business product capable, and blue areas (further out) would be T1 to 10Mbps symmetric (business products only) capable.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Apr 13, 2009
Well I’m sitting in a green area, and I’d sure sign up for Fusion if you were here….
Joe
By Joe Killian on Apr 13, 2009
We need to find lots more folks like you to make the case.
I’m really thinking some sort of tool that allows a grass roots “bring it here!” effort to be managed by the community would be a big help. No time to build that here right now thought.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Apr 13, 2009
Had your Fusion product installed yesterday. I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed. While your promotional materials, like every other ISP, represent “ideal” download speeds….reality is very different. I’m paying for fusion, yet the tech support guy has put me back on regular ADSL (1), because, “it’s faster” for me. Granted I understand I’m not very close to the CO, but the “hype” surrounding the Fusion product should make more clear (without having to look through the fine print) that the benefits are for those who are close to the CO. I do know that my neighbor, who has ATT DSL, is getting better speeds than I am. I know, that’s how DSL works, but I guess I expected more upfront honesty from Sonic.net. I could have stayed with Earthlink or switched to ATT, which now offers dry loop DSL.
By James Hattori on Apr 24, 2009
In response to James Hattori’s apr 24, comment:
It is unfortunate that you didn’t get the speed you expected. I take pride in my choice of ISP from the fact that your comment appeared on this blog and in my inbox.
By Richard Klein on Apr 24, 2009
James,
Distance and wire quality are the primary factors in DSL services. We can help you determine if AT&T has equipment closer than our own (a neighborhood gateway as opposed to a longer central office loop.). If this is the case, you could be better served on the AT&T network than our own. Drop me an email (dane@corp.sonic.net) and I will make sure you get all the info you need in order to decide on the best course.
-Dane
PS: for others on long loops where both Sonic.net’s Fusion product and AT&T’s offering would be served out of the central office, one up side in Fusion is the upcoming launch of pair bonded service, delivering double the speed.
By Dane Jasper on Apr 24, 2009
Please, for the love of Dog, think of El Cerrito/Richmond!
We’re stuck with comcast (yick) here for any decent speeds….Enough said!
PLEASE BRING FUSION HERE SOON!!!!!
I love (and miss) Sonic.net!
By Jamie on Apr 27, 2009
Jamie,
We’re up and running in Albany 11, which covers as far North as Schmidt Ave in El Cerrito, but Fusion product availability ends about Fairmont Ave in the Northward direction due to distance limitations.
The challenge is that El Cerrito is served from Albany from Schmidt Ave Southward, then from Richmond from there North. In either case, if you’re near the middle, it’s a long way to the equipment no matter which CO you’re served out of.
By Dane Jasper on Apr 27, 2009
I actually drove alongside the SONIC.NET logo covered van today. It looks glorious and I am proud to be a sonic.net customer. The BEST ISP in the Bay Area, North or where ever else you choose to cover.
By Donna Shore on Apr 28, 2009
“Jamie,
We’re up and running in Albany 11, which covers as far North as Schmidt Ave in El Cerrito, but Fusion product availability ends about Fairmont Ave in the Northward direction due to distance limitations.
The challenge is that El Cerrito is served from Albany from Schmidt Ave Southward, then from Richmond from there North. In either case, if you’re near the middle, it’s a long way to the equipment no matter which CO you’re served out of.”
——————————-
I’m about two blocks North away from Schmidt and 4 or 5 from Fairmount……..
Wow, within blocks, but so far away from the CO.
Are there any stats of Bandwidth that people are getting in this neck of the East Bay? I only get 2.2mbs from cable anyway (with Comcasts “high speed” line), so I’ll GLADLY settle with 1.5′ish mbs if I can get it from Sonic and get rid of comcast!
By Jamie on Apr 28, 2009
You can email me a specific address and/or an existing telephone number and I can give you lots of specifics! dane@corp.sonic.net is my email.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Apr 30, 2009
Dane, come to San Francisco please!
Specifically: the SOMA district! Specifically: SNFCCA04 =] I would totally jump on the Fusion product.
By Alan on May 1, 2009
Alan,
We are up and running in all nine San Francisco COs today! You can order online now.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on May 1, 2009
Dane, I’ve just got Fusion going (510/524 …); no need to look into my service, Support’s working at getting speed up to spec.
My question is whether your sharing/WiFi program is still happening. I got an original Meraki indoors and it’s helping out several neighbors from time to time. I wanted to get a poletop but they weren’t available. I’ve heard from Support that you first changed from Meraki to other hardware and that this sharing program is not being pursued any longer.
I thought it was a great idea, and I still think you could find a great social-networking benefit in it that ought to lead to more customers. For example I’d like to get some of the elderly folks who never got online connected (find someone who can help put a unix variant on old PCs, add Firefox). These are retired university folks mostly, but from the DOS/ASCII era.
THey watch the block for those of us who are out at work often. They could watch back yards or households, with some network cameras. It’d be a social boost for the whole neighborhood. It’d be far cheaper than alarm systems and far more social benefit. And I”m sure it’d draw customers.
Right now when the Internet breaks, people have to wait til I get home (grin).
So — what’s up with the WiFi sharing? Any thoughts or place to talk about it? Is it happening elsewhere, maybe in SF already? I don’t know if Sonic’s going this direction. But I’m sure no other ISP would.
By ankh on May 23, 2009
Dane,
I was interested in getting phone service- just to get away from ATT..After talking with a rep., I found out about Dry DSL.. Very interesting!! Please expand into San Leandro soon…
By alan on May 31, 2009
Mark me down as another Alameda resident who’d get fusion in a heartbeat.
By Drew on Jun 1, 2009
Drew, we are delivering service in Albany today – have you ordered? The product info and order page is at http://www.sonic.net/sales/fusion/broadband/
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Jun 1, 2009
Ankh,
We are still running our Wi-Fi sharing program – you can find details about it here: http://www.sonic.net/wifi/
By Dane Jasper on Jun 1, 2009
Soooooooooooo …. is the outlook decent? Obviously, things have changed in the last 3 months due to economic considerations, etc..
You are right about San Jose being a long drive from Santa Rosa. I learned that the other way around: Santa Rosa is a long drive from San Jose. I’m showing 105 miles from maps.google.com, and that’s around two hours give or take twenty minutes, also according to maps.google.com. While there may be plenty of San Jose customers at some point in the future, whether they are in quantity enough to justify all that has to be considered is of question.
Also, I have to say, Comcast has been very successful at rolling out their Extreme service level in San Jose, which is 50megabits per second inbound and 10megabits per second outbound. While I would love to get a CLEC product from Sonic.net, and currently have both the highest available consumer products to me from Comcast and Sonic (Extreme 50mbps/10mbps and 1.5mbps/384kbps, respectively) and would continue that trend by ordering such a CLEC product, I’m not sure my solitary commitment is of much use. I probably won’t even be able to get it, since in this area, most of the people connected to this CO are very, very far away from the CO. OTOH, I used to be with San Jose’s North CO — that might have changed without me being aware.
I’ve mentioned a few times that if you partner with Cruzio in Santa Cruz, there may be one or two COs of interest there, depending on density and popularity. Cruzio could keep their branding, and sell your CLEC products; alternatively, you can also use your branding, and have the Cruzio partnership serve it. A little market research might be in order to find out if that would work.
Is Los Gatos just too small and weird and low density for you? I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case. You’d have to engender a relationship with Verizon, which would be odd, since in most cases, they deliver FiOS in their Southern California areas, but they haven’t shown much commitment in Northern California. You could basically ask them, is this worth it for us? Would Verizon be willing to sign some sort of if-you-offer-FiOS you buy us out clause to a contract with an amount per time component, to cover some of the lost investment should Verizon come thundering in with FiOS?
By Brad Allen on Jun 29, 2009
I’ve been thinking about this: regarding POTS, it is a bear to support, and has associated costs, but that’s why you get to charge for it. I’ve been running my system using Asterisk for over a year now, and it has its ups and downs, and doesn’t have the reliability of the old ma bell, but nothing does these days anyway. You could at least offer a POTS service of some sort. All it takes is a Linksys PAP2T or SPA2102, which I can find online for around $50. Run ulaw on that (same fidelity as POTS to the next CO using AT&T), and then add a support group to get that working cleanly (such as your own static IPv4 internal network with internal IPv4 addresses, which then gateway that stuff out to your telecommunications interconnects). That way, you can get POTS rolled out with minimum fuss.
You still have a lot of work to manage whatever kind of telephone delivery you do, even my suggestion, but the above has the flexibility to get rolling right away, regardless of what the eventual best track will be.
By Brad Allen on Jul 14, 2009
Brad,
We’re be doing POTS in the more traditional way, served from the CO, with no requirement for local equipment, or power. Full 911 support, etc will all be included.
Expected delivery is a couple months away.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Jul 14, 2009
Please could you post the full set of Fusion services with prices and specs on the sonic.net website. eg Express, Pro, Elite Max etc…..
By david on Jul 29, 2009
David,
We have the design folks working on this now.
The data was previously published in a blog posting here http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2008/08/06/fusion-product-pricing/ but portions are out of date, and due to anticipated reductions and new speed roll-outs, it’s going to be even more wrong shortly.
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Jul 29, 2009
Thanks Dane.
That sounds promising. Service is great so far in Albany. Any chance of improved upload speed?
By david on Jul 29, 2009
Yes, in the coming months you can expect two major new developments. The first is Annex M, which is a protocol specification which roughly doubles the upstream bit count. You can find some details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_G.992.5_Annex_M
The basic idea is to shift the upstream & downstream split, so this could result in some slight loss in downstream speed, but the benefit is roughly double the upstream capacity.
The other development is pair bonding. We will begin offering products in soon which use two pairs of wire instead of one, doubling both downstream and upstream speed.
Annex M and pair bonding can be combined, so you can expect to see products in the 30Mbps/4Mbps maximum speed using both. (We have demonstrated 40Mbps/5Mbps here in the lab, on very short cable lengths. Real world performance is of course lower.)
-Dane
By Dane Jasper on Jul 29, 2009
It’s been over six months since this post. How about an update? When will you start building out the South Bay COs? We are HUNGRY for a better provider at high speeds.
I will personally drive around San Jose with a large, magnetic “Sonic.net” decal on my car, to help you spread brand awareness, if that’s what it takes!
-Karl
By Karl on Oct 23, 2009
Karl,
Lots of location are in the pipeline, and we’re providing specifics as the come online. See for example the recent posting about San Rafael. I know that Napa is also about to wrap up. Our construction teams are all over the place now, working on a wide array of areas.
By Dane Jasper on Oct 23, 2009
Dane-
I’m still (Desperately) waiting for San Leandro to be built out.
Alan
By alan on Oct 23, 2009