What’s New.

I enjoyed being with Sonic for many years before leaving to join Pogowave. I am happy that Pogowave has been acquired by sonic and look forward to their continued excellent support. jim_robinson

By Jim on Jun 6, 2009

What places are covered? Occidental?

By Robert Kourik on Jun 26, 2009

Do either Sonic or Pogowave intend to inform their customers of this change? I just heard about it from a friend, but haven’t received any official news or welcome or anything.
Not good, especially for those of us who spent hours at a county hearing in support of Pogowave. Not good for anyone, really.

By mj on Jun 26, 2009

Agreed, mj. We, too, received no official notice of this hand-off – just “word of mouth.”

I’m hoping that this will be a change for the better. One small immediate improvement – we now have a toll-free tech support phone number: 872-9617.

By Jeff on Jul 1, 2009

Hello All. First of all I would like to apologize for not responding more quickly. It is good to see some comments regarding this transition. Thank you.

Robert; The Pogowave network has extensive coverage in Occidental, as well as most of western Sonoma County.

mj; We did intend to send customers a postal letter, but I think it got missed. Due to our longstanding relationship with Pogowave the transition should have been quite smooth. Please do let us know if you have experienced any disruption.

I am also told that the hearing was regarding radio access issues, and your support did help keep the network up and running even with the transition in ownership. Thank you all for that too!

Jeff; That number may not be local to all Pogowave users, but if not they can use the tool at http://sonic.net/popf2 to find one.

I hope this addresses all the questions so far. Again my apologies for the delayed response, and hence this rather text heavy comment.

By kavan on Jul 1, 2009

Is there going to be a new combined price for having both sonic and pogowave? Do we need to have both.
Thanks
Marc

By MARC HORRELL on Jul 5, 2009

Sonic’s acquisition of PogoWave is of interest to those who live on Saint Helena Road and are now using WildBlue. We heard there was a tower near Mt Hood called the “Mayacamus Tower” that is supposed to be illuminating our direction.
1) Does that antenna illuminate down to the Saint Helena Road valley floor? What about the northern facing hillsides?
2) Is there any plans to put a 7 degree cone antenna on the Mt Barham antenna? We heard there was one sitting on the floor of the Broadlink offices. Not installed.
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, there is a BIG customer base on Saint Helena Road ready and frustratedly waiting….

By Tim on Jul 10, 2009

We also are previous Sonic subscribers who switched to PogoWave to get high speed internet. We were delighted to have a connection 10x faster than Dial-up. We just checked the speed and it is now 20x faster on download and 30x faster on upload. Is that an improvement that Sonic made since taking over PogoWave? Rumor has it that our neighbors on Dial Up will soon be able to get higher speed internet. Will this be similar to the PogoWave installation, or something different?

By Darlene on Jul 27, 2009

We have made a number of changes to the Pogowave infrastructure with an eye toward improving performance and reliability. If you are seeing that dramatic an improvement, I’m glad to hear it!

There should be no correlation between Pogowave wireless connections and dial-up, though.

By John F on Jul 27, 2009

Hi,

I am a Sonic customer since the beginning of time. I just put in Hughes Net in Occidental after looking at wild blue – no one in the sales dept of sonic even mentioned Pogo to me, it was a neighbor who told me about it. will you tell me about it, and the pricing?

Still on my 30 day with Hughes Net but you need to hurry. Thank, Sherry

By Sherry H on Aug 3, 2009

Hello Sherry, I will submit your request to our sales department. I hope we can work something out for you!

By kavan on Aug 4, 2009

Darlene,
When we spoke on the phone I mentioned that the data transfer speeds for PogoWave are many hundreds of kbps. They are, and you can use their speed checker to verify that you have those speeds. But, you must also consider the very important bandwidth parameter. When you take a photo, perhaps you can not get all of the view in one shot. So, you take several, and electronically paste them together to get the total picture. That’s akin to lack of bandwidth, as it pushes the total time upward. Data can be transfered rapidly, but if you can’t get it all in one shot, you must return for more until the entire picture is developed. Lack of sufficent bandwidth can decrease the speed your computer shows you are getting, dropping it well below the many-hundred kbps Sonic sales speeds.
All that said, I love the PogoWave experience! It’s a great system.

By Floyd on Aug 7, 2009

Hi I am a customer of both Sonic and Pogowave and would like to not pay double for services any longer. What is being done about that? I also am interested in what kind of speed upgrades are available and what technology upgrades are becoming available to get the internet speeds up to the ranges that exist with cable connections.

I am enjoying the speed upgrades from my experiences with Direct TV and Wild Blue and look forward to things getting even faster.

Thank you

By Henry Kimsey-House on Aug 13, 2009

Bill,

Sorry for the delay, I’ll pass on your comments to the folks doing work on wireless products. Today we only have two staff managing that, so they do have some backlog.

The plan is to have all our other installers trained to do wireless products as well, but they’re so busy installing new wireline Fusion and FlexLink products that they’re simply not available as a resource.

On the up side, we hired a new installer last week, and are currently interviewing for at least a few more.

-Dane

By dane on Sep 10, 2009

Dane,

Thanks for the answer on Facebook, I will take the thread back to email. We live on Olivet Lane and had tried for Sonic wireless but were in a shadow, so subscribed to PogoWave. Service has been OK on both Pogo and Sonic. Didn’t copy the change until checking my credit card billing. I see by the thread that a lot of other customers didn’t get notified either. What other services of Sonic are we able to get now?

Cheers, Bob

By Bob Archibald on Sep 11, 2009

We had set up automatic billing on our credit card for Pogowave. How is Sonic handling our billing now?

By John H on Nov 3, 2009