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.
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.
Last cabinets, for Forestville and one final San Francisco office
We have had twenty huge cabinets on top of the shelves for quite a few months, and the place really was quite full. In addition to the cabinets, there were many boxes of DSLAMs, ADSL2+ and EFM cards and various parts. Now, these last two cabinets are the only ones left, the rest are gone, gone, off to deployment.
It’s an exciting time, as we draw close to completion of our first nineteen central offices.
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.
The first thing that comes to mind when I try to describe the Sebastopol central office is “cute”. It reminds me of Sonic.net’s old datacenter; crowded, small, but with purpose. It’s a plucky little CO.
Yesterday we began the installation process in Sebastopol for our next generation products: FlexLink for medium sized businesses and enterprise and Fusion for small business and home. The first cabinet went in (low ceiling!), and the drilling has begun. Two holes down this afternoon, two to go.
We should be bolted down tomorrow, then equipment rack-in, power turn-up, and copper termination. The last part will probably take the longest, as we are pre-building a lot of copper capacity, and it is all done by hand.
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We have expanded our FlexLink Ethernet offerings to 30Mbps symmetric (down and upstream) speed for businesses near the Santa Rosa downtown area. Product info will be updated shortly at: www.sonic.net/sales/flexlink
For business customers in Santa Rosa, both the ADSL2+ at up to 15Mbps/1Mbps and Ethernet products at up to 30Mbps/30Mbps are very exciting.
For folks interested in some of the technical details of the new solutions we are deploying, here are some links:
ADSL2+: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_G.992.5
ADSL2+M: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_G.992.5_Annex_M
EFM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_in_the_first_mile
Our current deployment can support bonding of up to two pairs of ADSL2+, and up to eight pairs using EFM. You can do the math. =)
At over a mile of distance, we’re very pleased with the 3.5Mbps symmetric performance we’re seeing on this single pair test loop. With eight pair bonding (8×3.5, in this example), this means delivery of a 25Mbps symmetric link is possible at this sort of range. This very exciting technology uses “Ethernet in the First Mile” (EFM) technology to deliver speeds from 1.5Mbps (T1) to 45Mbps (T3) on one to eight copper wire pairs.
Symmetric products at T1 to T3 speeds are ideal for business customers seeking to extend their local area networks at Ethernet speeds, and for fast Internet performance both downstream and up.