Sonic Internet - anyone have any experience?

[y_p_w]

So my parents are tired of dealing with Comcast and their prices and I suggested the big fiber internet provider in the area - Sonic. I suppose there might be a few drawbacks including no automatic connection for ESPN3, but that's relatively minor.

I set it up for them over a month ago and I saw their response where I wasn't even sure they were availble in the neighborhood. It just said that they would let him know when they would be available. But few weeks ago he got a message that they were going to do a "fiber drop" to the house and he didn't need to be at home. I'm over with my folks today, but the message said it would be done tomorrow within a certain window and they would knock on the door first as a courtesy, even though nobody needed to be at home. But we heard a sound (dropping road cones) and they've by with a cherry picker. So I went out and asked and it was Sonic.

The message said that after the "fiber drop" they would schedule installation. Not sure what this means. Maybe just an electrical connection? An additional fiber extension? I'm also thinking they'll bring the equipment. They've been using an all-in-one box as the cable modem and Wi-Fi. I helped them order a new Wi-Fi access point with 4 wired ports, where they're going to need at least one for their wired VoIP box.

So anyone who has gotten fiber service know what the next steps are? I noticed that they connected to a specific part of the house, but not anywhere near where any previous cable/internet line entered the house.

 

[Pew]

So anyone who has gotten fiber service know what the next steps are? I noticed that they connected to a specific part of the house, but not anywhere near where any previous cable/internet line entered the house.

I've been through a couple, but to businesses and not houses. From my experience the ISP will route the fiber from the DMARC to the minimum point of entry (MPOE) of the building. That's what you just saw. The following point may differ from residential service; the ISP then pulled the fiber from the MPOE to our backer board in the mechanical room. I doubt they will pull the fiber to a different location on the house but you will most likely have to pay for them to do so if you don't run it yourself.

 

[y_p_w]

I've been through a couple, but to businesses and not houses. From my experience the ISP will route the fiber from the DMARC to the minimum point of entry (MPOE) of the building. That's what you just saw. The following point may differ from residential service; the ISP then pulled the fiber from the MPOE to our backer board in the mechanical room. I doubt they will pull the fiber to a different location on the house but you will most likely have to pay for them to do so if you don't run it yourself.

I had a look at what they actually set up. I don't think it's just going in as is. There's this "ledge" (kind of hard to describe this part of the house) where I see one white cable terminated with a green connector but two black cables that haven't been terminated yet. These are bundled together in a rather large loop that's just sort of hanging there on a hook. So it looks like there's a lot of cable available for whatever they plan on doing.

 

[Pew]

I had a look at what they actually set up. I don't think it's just going in as is. There's this "ledge" (kind of hard to describe this part of the house) where I see one white cable terminated with a green connector but two black cables that haven't been terminated yet. These are bundled together in a rather large loop that's just sort of hanging there on a hook. So it looks like there's a lot of cable available for whatever they plan on doing.

I have no idea on that part. There's others here though that have great fiber knowledge so I'd like to know too.

 

[wwillson]

I had a look at what they actually set up. I don't think it's just going in as is. There's this "ledge" (kind of hard to describe this part of the house) where I see one white cable terminated with a green connector but two black cables that haven't been terminated yet. These are bundled together in a rather large loop that's just sort of hanging there on a hook. So it looks like there's a lot of cable available for whatever they plan on doing.

A picture would be great.

 

[loneryder]

They have to run the fiber cable into your house in one piece. Wherever you want the modem to be is where they will run it. Then there are a couple of boxes that have to be plugged in to power. Frontier ran 1000ft of fiber from the pole to my house and up the side of the house where I wanted the connection. Cable costs $6 per foot made by Corning. Frontier uses the Eero system from Amazon. They gave me one Eero device. I purchased another one from Amazon on one of their Prime sales. It's a mesh system, easy to connect as it does everything for you. I have good wifi on both levels of the house.
They are running fiber all over our rural county here in WV. They are spending some of that govt money that was for rural internet but was never spent. It is a condition of their takeover by Verizon. I didn't pay for any of it except for $45 a mo for 500/500. It concerns me what Verizon will do when they take over.

 

[y_p_w]

I came over to see the installation. Still not done yet. The interior equipment was installed before the exterior cables had been terminated. And there’s still plenty of cable left.

The equipment is an AdTran 622v that’s mounted on the wall. It has a gigabit port and a 10 gigabit port, along with two phone ports (for their VoIP service).

https://help.sonic.com/hc/en-us/articles/7636761061655-AdTran-622v

 

[y_p_w]

It's up and working although it was a little bit odd with the installer's laptop where I brought mine in to test the connection. Have never seen home internet this fast, and apparently it would be faster with a 10G ethernet connection.

 

[y_p_w]

They have to run the fiber cable into your house in one piece. Wherever you want the modem to be is where they will run it. Then there are a couple of boxes that have to be plugged in to power. Frontier ran 1000ft of fiber from the pole to my house and up the side of the house where I wanted the connection. Cable costs $6 per foot made by Corning. Frontier uses the Eero system from Amazon. They gave me one Eero device. I purchased another one from Amazon on one of their Prime sales. It's a mesh system, easy to connect as it does everything for you. I have good wifi on both levels of the house.
They are running fiber all over our rural county here in WV. They are spending some of that govt money that was for rural internet but was never spent. It is a condition of their takeover by Verizon. I didn't pay for any of it except for $45 a mo for 500/500. It concerns me what Verizon will do when they take over.

Sure the fiber is that expensive? This place is selling 2 strand cable for $110 for a single spool of 1000 ft.

https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/fiber-optic/bulk-fiber-9-125/product-10f3-002nh.php

And after the installation was over I think there's over 100 ft of Corning cable.

I remember taking a fields and waves class. Stuff like skin depth, characteristic impedance, transmission lines, waveguides, attenuation, etc. Don't remember much about it though, but some of it was strictly about light even though that's not exactly electrical engineering. I do remember a class discussion on fiber optics, where apparently they tune the transmission material so that it's got virtually "total internal reflection" at a specified frequency and will just bounce back off the interior surface of the fiber with almost no losses for extremely long distances. I guess even thousands of miles like with undersea transmission lines.

 

[wwillson]

Cable costs $6 per foot made by Corning.

Telcos probably pay $0.20/ft for two strand direct bury residential fiber.

 

[loneryder]

Telcos probably pay $0.20/ft for two strand direct bury residential fiber.

That's what the tech told me. Maybe that's what they charge the govt.

 

[loneryder]

It's up and working although it was a little bit odd with the installer's laptop where I brought mine in to test the connection. Have never seen home internet this fast, and apparently it would be faster with a 10G ethernet connection.

View attachment 254417

View attachment 254419

Is that wifi or ethernet connection? Isn't it awesome getting service that fast!!

 

[y_p_w]

Is that wifi or ethernet connection? Isn't it awesome getting service that fast!!

That was wired. The installer said it was capable of 10 times that with the right equipment. But after I installed a new Netgear R6700AX box I tried out its 5G Wi-Fi on a variety of different devices. My iPad mini 6 was the fastest at over 600+ mbit/sec up and down. Other devices didn't seem to have that kind of Wi-Fi speed.

The box was kind of a pain though. I didn't feel like doing anything but using the default SSID and password, but I couldn't seem to get any internet access. Then I found that it had to connect to a setup utility first, and that was kind of painful even though I didn't change any of the default settings. But now it's just absolutely flying. This thing is reaching parts of the house that had a weak signal with the old ARRIS all-in-one cable modem's Wi-Fi.

Not sure what the issue was with packet loss, but I don't see that any more. That screenshot was less than a half hour after the new service went live.

 

[wwillson]

That was wired. The installer said it was capable of 10 times that with the right equipment.

The installer may not understand how PON works. The bitrate of the PON and your physical ethernet interface are both 10Gb/s. Your PON connection shares the 10Gb/s bandwidth with every other house on that segment. Likely when the OLT is full, you'll be sharing the bandwidth with 16, 32, or 64 other houses. You could never get the full 10Gb/s to your ONU because of contention and the traffic shaping/fairness rules wouldn't allow it either.

 

[y_p_w]

The installer may not understand how PON works. The bitrate of the PON and your physical ethernet interface are both 10Gb/s. Your PON connection shares the 10Gb/s bandwidth with every other house on that segment. Likely when the OLT is full, you'll be sharing the bandwidth with 16, 32, or 64 other houses. You could never get the full 10Gb/s to your ONU because of contention and the traffic shaping/fairness rules wouldn't allow it either.

I’ve seen some screen shots of Sonic Internet users running speed tests with 8+ gbit/sec down and 7+ up. Obviously it’s not going to work if there are dozens of their customers trying to run speed tests simultaneously.

 

[dogememe]

Now that they're building their own fiber network and not reselling AT&T DSL like they used to a decade ago Sonic offers great speeds and pricing.

My best friend has their 10Gbit fiber at his home and my ex had 1Gbit fiber from them. Both are/were happy with the speeds and price. BUT it's not particularly reliable. Frequent outages across two completely different cities.

My best friend with the 10G Sonic fiber also has AT&T fiber and Verizon 5G Home Internet as backup because he relies on his internet for work and Sonic goes down at least once every couple months for hours at a time.

The Verizon came in handy when some sort of big truck took a wrong turn on his residential street and ripped down all the fiber both Sonic and AT&Ts. If I remember right, although my memory on this is murky, AT&T fixed theirs the next day... Sonic took over a week.

I'd be thrilled to get Sonic here at home and ditch Comcast/Xfinity with their lame upload speeds BUT I'd probably sign up for Verizon 5G Home Internet as a backup because of how unreliable Sonic has traditionally been. While Comcast has only been down once for maybe three hours in like two years? Sadly no fiber provider serves my block... One block down the street, AT&T fiber is available. Big bummer!

If you can get AT&T fiber it is much more reliable service but you pay more for not quite as fast of speeds. Sonic wins in the price per dollar category. But I'd rather have reliability... internet is basically essential at this point and I don't think the average person could tell the difference between 10G and 1G fiber... especially given that most computers only have gigabit Ethernet ports anyway and unless you have some hefty equipment you won't get over 500Mb on WiFi anyway.

 

[wwillson]

I don't think the average person could tell the difference between 10G and 1G fiber

99% of applications do not need high throughput, only the occasional bulk download will ever use even close to port speed. Application performance is a product of delivery (packet loss), latency, and jitter. It does work to market the 'benefits' of 10G speeds, but the reality is there is no benefit. I want to see the quality trends of the provider's network, but for some reason marketing doesn't share those

 

[loneryder]

The installer may not understand how PON works. The bitrate of the PON and your physical ethernet interface are both 10Gb/s. Your PON connection shares the 10Gb/s bandwidth with every other house on that segment. Likely when the OLT is full, you'll be sharing the bandwidth with 16, 32, or 64 other houses. You could never get the full 10Gb/s to your ONU because of contention and the traffic shaping/fairness rules wouldn't allow it either.

The installer told me that other people on the main line wouldn't affect my speed. I questioned the same thing. The line comes to a pole a 1000ft. from my house. It terminates at a box that each house connects to. There are 3 of us connected the that switch.

 

[loneryder]

That was wired. The installer said it was capable of 10 times that with the right equipment. But after I installed a new Netgear R6700AX box I tried out its 5G Wi-Fi on a variety of different devices. My iPad mini 6 was the fastest at over 600+ mbit/sec up and down. Other devices didn't seem to have that kind of Wi-Fi speed.

The box was kind of a pain though. I didn't feel like doing anything but using the default SSID and password, but I couldn't seem to get any internet access. Then I found that it had to connect to a setup utility first, and that was kind of painful even though I didn't change any of the default settings. But now it's just absolutely flying. This thing is reaching parts of the house that had a weak signal with the old ARRIS all-in-one cable modem's Wi-Fi.

Not sure what the issue was with packet loss, but I don't see that any more. That screenshot was less than a half hour after the new service went live.

I had an Arris on a doubled telephone line that gave me 30mbps dsl. It actually streamed pretty well, it just was down a lot of time. I've had the fiber now for a couple of months and not even a flicker.

 

[wwillson]

The installer told me that other people on the main line wouldn't affect my speed. I questioned the same thing. The line comes to a pole a 1000ft. from my house. It terminates at a box that each house connects to. There are 3 of us connected the that switch.

Confirmed, the installer doesn't know how PON works...