Hayward City Hall
Our new network is online in Hayward, adding new coverage in the East Bay. Customers in the Hayward area can now order our residential and small business Fusion Broadband services, and our enterprise FlexLink Ethernet services.
Elsewhere in the Bay Area construction is underway, with staff working hard every day to bring service to new areas.
Downtown Oakland and the Bay
Sonic.net’s innovative carrier Ethernet and ADSL2+ products are now online in the Oakland area. FlexLink’s Ethernet access is perfect for business users with symmetric bandwidth needs, and includes a string business grade service level agreement to back up it’s reliability. Fusion Broadband’s ADSL2+ and pair bonded ADSL2+ services bring fast asymmetric speeds to small business and residential users.
With Oakland online, we are now offering service in a pretty big chunk of the Easy Bay. The coverage spans from Oakland, through Berkeley, Albany and Richmond.
All: FlexLink Green/Yellow: Fusion (approximate)
We are now taking orders for our next generation carrier services in the Napa area. This new network brings an awful lot of bandwidth through Napa because it’s on our big new fiber ring. Consumers and small businesses can get products up to a max of 30Mbps now in many areas in Napa.
I’m guessing that a lot of Napa area wineries may be interested in reviewing their current Internet connections. The new network brings long range T1 products online at aggressive new pricing, as low as $229/mo. For a business in a more remote location, this is a great product and price! For details, contact us!
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.
I’m happy to announce that we have reduced pricing for many of our higher speed Fusion Broadband products. This, plus increases in speed are part of our goal to bring additional value to these exciting new products.
For existing customers, price reductions will be reflected automatically on your next billing cycle.
With these price reductions, existing customers should consider upgrading their speed if their location is qualified. If you’d like to upgrade an existing circuit, please write to sales@sonic.net to get the process underway.
Residential locations, dynamic IP:
Residential locations, 8 static IPs:
Business locations, dynamic IP:
Business locations, 8 static IPs:
I am very pleased with the growth in customer signups for Fusion and FlexLink products on our new network, and I appreciate everyone’s continued patronage. Please tell a neighbor about Sonic.net Fusion!
Note: Product speeds noted above are delivered as a range from the next lower product up to the maximum, for example 18Mbps/1Mbps service may be delivered as any speed greater than 12Mbps (the next product down) up to 18Mbps, with upstream of up to 1Mbps. Actual delivered speed is based upon copper line quality and distance. If the delivered sync rate does not meet the range of the product ordered, a downgrade and pricing reduction to the lower speed product tier is applied.
This week we have demonstrated ADSL2+ connection speeds of 46Mbps downstream and 4.8Mbps upstream. Our network design team achieved this speed in the lab environment, on a short copper loop.
Because of longer loops and interference, this is not a speed that we will see in the real world, but it is very exciting to see the full potential of ADSL2+/Annex M.
Today we have staff with real world loops running at over 30Mbps, so that is a more realistic goal.
Two pairs of telephone wire were used in the test to deliver a bonded (double pair or four wire) ADSL2+ link, with Annex M (double upstream) capability turned on. Actual FTP transfer speeds were demonstrated at over 42Mbps upstream and 4.5Mbps outbound after overhead.
We are working on the wrap-up of product design and pricing for our new pair bonded Fusion products, and we plan to announce the details shortly.
Sonic.net Fusion Broadband continues to bring customers innovation in Internet access.
The City of Santa Rosa IT team and Sonic.net were a big part of the first stage of the Amgen Tour of California event. Sonic.net provided key infrastructure for the Amgen Tour television production and for the local events in Railroad Square.
Feeding the television production’s main Sat-Link truck, Sonic.net provided a 10Mbps/10Mbps FlexLink Ethernet connection. This circuit was delivered with just two weeks notice. (The typical turnaround for these type of products is 30 days.) The fast Ethernet symmetric connection was used to deliver a LAN for a day throughout the High-Def TV production area, serving various production trailers.
In Railroad Square, Sonic.net provided a fast DSL connection to deliver video to the “Jumbotron”, keeping race fans updated with news on the race.
We are very excited about our new FlexLink Ethernet and Fusion ADSL products, which are available for both business and residential users. Sunday’s event was a great chance to show off the capabilities of these fast products.
FlexLink offers 1.5Mbps (T1) up to 30Mbps Ethernet connections for business users. FlexLink includes strong service level agreements with a four hour repair response which is essential for business. FlexLink Ethernet has widespread availability, going beyond the length restrictions of consumer DSL connections.
Fusion Broadband DSL provides asymmetric broadband service using a dedicated line, with optional conventional line shared voice telephone service coming soon. Speeds offered range from up to 6Mbps/1Mbps to 18Mbps/1Mbps. In the future, Fusion Broadband will offer pair bonding for faster speeds at all distances, and faster upstream speed options are also in the works.
Our network build teams are making very good progress on the 19 central offices which we are building out in the first phase. We have had teams in San Francisco, the East Bay, Sacramento and all around Sonoma County over the last month and a half. Here are a few photos of cabinet load-in to a San Francisco central office, plus an update of our hand-crafted build status board.
Photo: Scott Manchester / PD
There’s an article in the Press Democrat today about Sonic.net’s expansion as a telecommunications and access provider.
This is a project we’ve been working on for over two years now, and Santa Rosa is just the first of many areas where service will be available. Businesses near downtown Santa Rosa can get on board now, with residential service to follow.
Read the full article now at PressDemocrat.com.
Our team today turned up pair bonded ADSL2+ to Tye C’s place. Tye works in tech support, and happens to live a little over one mile of copper wire away from the Santa Rosa downtown central office. And tonight, Tye is rocking 30Mbps of downstream bandwidth on two simple copper pairs. Nice work guys!
The loops to the house are each running about 15Mbps sync. The maximum sync that ADSL2+ can deliver is 24Mbps. But like ADSL1, which can do 8Mbps, in the real world we expect a slightly lower level. In ADSL1, the maximum practical speed is generally 6Mbps for most locations, and for ADSL2+, I think we’ll be real happy if we see 20Mbps as the top end in the real world. The 15Mbps speed that Tye’s got is likely to be more common.
This makes bonding even more interesting. Every home has at least two “phone lines” – we can deliver voice lines on both of them (main home line, second line for home office or FAX perhaps), plus bonded IP at 2x the ADSL2+ sync. That means some serious bandwidth potential for our business and residential users.
I’ll caution that we haven’t yet designed product specifications and price points for residential users at this speed, but the technology does work. The business model is a separate question.